That microsoft’s code is not always secure, is very clear again with this XSS exploit. This is not the first XSS exploit that has been found, others have been found.

Sixteen year-old Adriaan Graas from The Netherlands informed Microsoft last week about an XSS (cross site scripting) exploit he found in Hotmail. The exploit allows hackers to steal cookies from their victims and obtain full control over their inboxes without the need of knowing their passwords.

The idea is simple. When you are logged-in into Hotmail, a cookie is created which allows you access every time you are in it’s domain. Since the cookie is not IP-bind (how is this possible? – microsoft) we are able to fake the cookie, when stolen. Then use it to login. This all does mean that we do not have to know the password or even the email address of the victim. Trough XSS we can insert an piece of javascript code that will send the cookie to a webserver with an log script. This can be written in PHP, ASP, CGI practically anything you want. The cookie can be faked with Proxomitron.

Read more…

Today I will be posting a short article because I didn’t know I would be so tied up with the Live Support that I launched yesterday. Some of the cases were really tough but still managed to helped a few users and I am feeling really good about it. Anyway, have you ever noticed that there are times you’ll see weird characters such as %20, %3A and etc in webpages especially in URLs? These characters are called percent encoding and the 2 characters after the percentage sign actually represents a “reserved” character. Let’s do a simple test here if you don’t know what I am talking about. Open up Internet Explorer, type http://www.google.com/” in the URL and hit enter. Make sure you add a double quote after the slash. You will instantly see that the double quotes is being converted into %22.

Two days ago I received a copyright infringement notice and was asked to reply with the following subject RE%3A%20Copyright%20Infringement%20Notice%20ID%3A%20XXX%2DXXXXXXX or else my email would be treated as spam. I have done research on this before but I did not save the website that provided simply decoding to the percent encoding characters. When I really needed it again, I had to spend time looking up on the same thing that I’ve researched before. I am posting this out so I know where I can look it up in future and also hope that you guys can learn something new too.


There are 20 reserved characters including space ! * ‘ ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? % # [ ] that has to be encoded only under certain circumstances. You can refer to the table below to manually convert the percent encoding to a character.

Surely I am not going to memorize all those hex codes, so here is a website that has an online tool for automatic URL Encoding and Decoding.

Simply enter the percent encoded URL to the form and hit the Decode button. Voila, the decoded text shows immediately.

Nowadays modern computers comes with high memory, from 1GB to 4GB and some even up to 8GB! Although powerful computers with high memory theoretically can multitask a lot of software together, but let us say if you load a firewall, an antivirus, Firefox browser, Nero Burning ROM, Adobe PDF Reader and a few more resource hungry software, you will feel that Windows starts to perform very slowly even if you still have a lot of free memory. Some of the symptoms are clicking the start menu and it is slow to appear, Windows Explorer takes a while to load and etc. That’s the reason why I don’t turn on the antivirus real-time file scanner even if I have 2GB of memory.

One of the biggest problem is using Firefox. I use it everyday and the hungry Firefox monster really eats up a lot of memory after using it to browse the web for a period of time. From the image below, it shows that it takes up 126MB but there were times that it can go up to 200+MB.

I know that there’s the “Ultimate Firefox Optimizer” which can reduce the memory usage from hundreds of megabytes (MB) to a few hundred kilobytes (KB). It is amazing but I’ve never used it nor posted it on this website because it doesn’t have an official website which makes it unreliable. Scanning it on Virustotal (36 antivirus) and 13 antivirus detects it as adware. Even Kaspersky’s Virus Analyst Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky confirms that it is an adware.

Here’s an even better solution on how to reduce the memory usage for any running programs.


Minimem is a memory optimization solution to run modern applications on not-so-modern computers. Initially developed for Firefox only, Minimem now can reduce the memory footprint of any application. It runs in the background and can be set up to optimize as many processes as you’d like, using a very intuitive graphical interface. Unlike other memory optimization tools, it gives you full control over what applications you want to optimize, when and how often.

It optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes. It does so at regular intervals which can be user-defined as well and every 30s by default. This then optimizes your applications which can load those pages back whenever they need, and makes your overall system perform much better whenever it is memory limited.

Minimem remembers all of your settings; it is hence recommended to define once your processes to optimize and memory reduction period if you’d like to not use the default one, and then set Minimem to auto-start with your system. Its use will then become transparent to you and it will just do its job silently. Applications that are best to optimize for memory are typically office applications, typically word processors, and web browsers. On that last front Minimem has been tested to be extremely efficient with Firefox, the application it was originally designed for. Minimem does not replace your task manager and you should use this task manager if you’d like to analyse how much memory your various processes take; just press Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open it.

Yay! Minimem reduced Firefox’s memory usage to 12MB and it does that every 30 seconds! The best part is I can select a few more running application to automatically optimize the memory usage.

[ Download Minimem ]

Today we are seeing a lot of animations and effects integrated into operating systems and third party software to provide a more visually appealing feel to the user. Obviously we won’t want to go back to the Windows 95 era where the graphical user interface is so boring and I get sleepy by just looking at it. However, too much effects and animations gets on my nerves as well. For example, minimizing or maximizing a folder that is already opened in Windows 7 can be nice as it doesn’t put on any extra load on the system. Although I do have that few milliseconds to spare, but I personally prefer things to work snappy.

If you haven’t noticed, there is animation when you open a new tab in Firefox. It is obviously there to make the browser more visually appealing. If you are like me that prefer things to be snappy, fortunately there is an easy way to disable the Firefox new tab animation.


Type about:config at the URL bar and hit enter. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise button. Type browser.tabs.animate at the filter bar and hit enter. Simply double click on the browser.tabs.animate to change the value from true to false.

This change takes effect immediately without restarting the Firefox browser. You should now feel that opening a new tab is slightly faster when the animation is disabled.

As a test, I captured the the action of opening tab in Firefox with HyperCam and extracted every frame from the video. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are 4 frames that shows the animation when opening a new tab in Firefox.

After disabling the animation, I did the same by recording the screen and extract every frame from the video. I couldn’t find any frames that shows half opened tab.

Both my PC and laptop has DVD-RW drive which I can use it to burn mp3 to audio cd. I usually use my laptop to burn and never had any problems with it.
Suddenly, one fine day I wanted to burn my mp3s to audio CD to listen in my car. Everything went as normal but when I played the audio cd in my car’s player, a few songs had the skipping problem. It doesn’t skip the whole song, but it skipped a couple of second. I thought the audio CD might be scratched. I took out the CD and the back layer looked perfect. I poped in a different audio CD, and it played fine. Meaning, it can’t be my car’s audio player.

Then I tested the CD on my Hi-Fi set at home and also my laptop and computer. All 3 had the same audio skipping problems for a few second at the same track. Ok, it’s quite obvious at that time it’s the audio CD’s problem.
I took out a new CD-R and burned the mp3 to audio cd at the slowest speed. Tried it again, and still had the same audio skipping problem. I listened to the MP3 on my laptop and the whole track played perfectly.
I got a shocked and thought that it might be the problem with my laptop’s DVD-RW drive.
So test whether the problem is on my laptop’s DVD-RW drive, I tried burning the same mp3 on my PC’s DVD-RW drive.
Installed the latest Nero7, burned the same mp3 at the slowest speed and still had that audio skipping problem!

It’s getting frustrating because I am wasting a lot of CD-Rs and they are not the cheap type. I usually buy the high quality CD-R Imation so it can play on any player. But then, it could be that batch of CD-Rs that is causing the problem. I took out a usable CD-RW and burn the mp3 to audio cd, problem still exist.
I thought to myself that it might be the mp3 problem. Perhaps the person who converted from audio cd to mp3 didn’t do a good job. So I tried burning other mp3 to audio CD on my laptop. SH*T! Some of the tracks skipped for a few second!


Now I am able to rule out that it’s not my DVD-RW drive, CD-R or CD-RW media disc, or or my car’s audio player. Again, I gave it a thought and thinking it might be the operating system’s problem. I reinstalled a fresh clean Microsoft Windows XP Professional on my computer and immediately installed the latest Nero7 without installing anything else. If I still have audio cd skipping problem this time, it’s definately Nero7 that is causing it. Right on the money, the new audio cd still skips!
I remembered that when I was using the old Nero 6, I never had any problems in burning from mp3 to audio CD.
So I uninstalled Nero7 using Nero General Clean Tool, and installed Nero 6. This time I burn the same mp3 on the same batch of CD-R on my computer, NO MORE audio skipping problem! I am still not convinced why the latest Nero 7 is causing this problem! I did another test which is uninstalled Nero 7 on my computer, installed Nero 6, and tried burning mp3 to audio CD on my PC. Tested the audio CD and certified no problem!

Solution to audio cd problem when burning from mp3 to audio CD, switch back to the latest Nero 6.
Another temporary solution is, to use Nero 6′s latest mp3PRO.dll file on Nero 7. I will show you how to do it step-by-step.
1. Download the latest Nero 7.2.0.3b
2. Download Nero 6 latest mp3PRO.dll
3. Extract the downloaded mp3PRO.zip and you will get the file mp3PRO.dll version 2.0.4.8
4. Copy mp3PRO.dll to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\AudioPlugins (Depending where is your Program Files, just change the drive C:\)
5. You can either overwrite the file, or backup the Nero7 mp3PRO.dll by renaming it to mp3PRO.bak

Now you should be able to burn mp3 to Audio CD using Nero 7 without having the audio skipping problem.

Two months ago I shared with you a tip on how to obtain 1 year iolo System Shield 3 Internet Security license for free. It is a full security suite that includes antivirus, firewall, antispyware, system guard, and system optimizer. The offer is still working but unfortunately not many users liked it since it uses a lot of memory and there are some compatibility problems with Vista.

After uninstalling iolo System Shield 3 Internet Security, you will find that the uninstaller does not complete removes iolo System Shield 3 from your computer. Try running Windows Task Manager and you will still find ioloServiceManager.exe process running taking up nearly 10MB of your memory.

Although it only shows one iolo process that is running, but in fact there are 4 iolo services running in background. There will also be some files leftover in C:\Program Files\iolo folder which you cannot delete because the files are still in used.

I’ve tried searching for an iolo removal tool but they don’t have one. No worries about that because I will show you how to safely remove the iolo services from your computer.


Just follow the simple steps below on how to clean up iolo after uninstallation.

1. Go to Start > Run, type services.msc and click OK.

2. A Services window will appear. Scroll down and look for iolo FileInfoList Service, iolo Product Update Service, iolo System Guard, and iolo System Service. Double click on all 4 services, and set the Startup type as Disabled.

3. Restart your computer.

4. Download Total Service and Driver Control (TSDC), extract and run TSDC.exe

5. TSDC will start to enumerate services and drivers. When it’s done, click the OK button. Select the iolo services and click the Remove button. Do that on all 4 iolo services.

6. Restart your computer.

7. Go to C:\Program Files\ and delete the whole iolo folder.

Now iolo service has been totally removed from your computer and theoretically freed up some memory. iolo should be aware of this issue and fix their uninstaller to remove the leftover services. Be careful when using TSDC to remove drivers from your computer because the last time I did that, it corrupted the driver registry and I couldn’t reinstall the driver. Finally I found out that I had to delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters to fix it.

I guess you should know what is Google Chrome is by now. If not, Google Chrome is a web browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. When Google announced Google Chrome to the world, everyone started writing about it in their websites and forums which is why the reason you don’t see it here. I’ve tested Google Chrome myself and find that the interface is simple and easy to use, doesn’t take much memory and fast. Google Chrome is very suitable for basic computer users who just want to surf the web.

Google Chrome is like Firefox that supports profiles. Any changes you make while using Google Chrome are stored in files so that they can be used the next time you run Google Chrome. These changes can be obvious, like your home page, bookmarks, username & passwords and etc. They’re all stored in the same location, called profile. These files by default are kept separately from the program files that Google Chrome uses to run, which don’t change. This means that you can uninstall Google Chrome without losing your settings.

It is possible to backup your Google Chrome profile and restore it on another computer, or create a multiple profiles when the browser is used by a few people.


Google Chrome Backup is a small tool to create, backup, restore and manage Google Chrome profiles. The profile holds personal data like history, bookmarks, etc. Everything is done with one click. Latest version also supports Chromium, which modified version of Google Chrome, for portable use.

You need Google Chrome installed in order for this tool to work. It supports 0.2.149.27 version of Google Chrome or Chromium, but also newer builds. To use chromium please select a path within the Google Chrome Backup.

When you backup a profile, this tool will save everything from profile folder to a single filename chrome_FOLDERNAME_DATE.gcb. According to Online TrID, the GCB file is actually a ZIP compressed archive which means you can open it with your favorite archiving software such as WinZIP, WinRAR, and etc.

Google Chrome Backup tool also allow you to easily create separate profiles in Google Chrome for other users. This way, you don’t need to be afraid of your family members snooping on the sites that you’ve been to… Just right click on the new profile, select Create Shortcut.

You will notice that there is a new icon at your Desktop which your family members can use it to run Google Chrome in a clean profile.

I did a very big mistake when testing this tool because I did not read the manual. So I’d like to warn you and hope you don’t do the same mistake as me. I backed up a Chrome profile and saved it in Desktop. Then I clicked the Add Existing button thinking that should be how I can restore the backed up profile. I browse the Desktop path and click the Add button. Now, a Google Chrome icon with the name Desktop appears in the backup tool. When I delete the profile that is saved at Desktop, everything in my desktop is wiped out! Luckily Recuva managed to recover 90% of the deleted files… So be very careful whenever you want to delete a profile. Make sure you know where is the profile location first by right clicking on the profile icon and select Details. It is important that the profile you want to delete should have a folder by itself.

[ Download Google Chrome Backup ]

When I first heard about BitTorrent, I immediately went to the official BitTorrent website to try to understand how it works. Somehow it seems a little complicated compared to Peer-2-Peer. P2P such as limewire is way easier because all I need is a client, search for what I am looking for and then download. Everything is done from the P2P client.

As for Torrent, I need to find out which bittorrent client suits me the best, what are the tracker sites I can use to search, what are seeders, peers, leechers, and finally how to optimize the bittorrent client in order to obtain the best download speed. Bittorrent is already very popular but there are still people asking me how it works.

Yesterday one of my friend who isn’t so good in computers wanted to download OpenOffice but he somehow he wasn’t able to download from the direct link. Another alternative to download OpenOffice is by using BitTorrent but the problem is he has never used BitTorrent. Instead of complicating him more, here is how I easily got him downloading OpenOffice using BitTorrent.


Torrent2Exe is a free web based service that can convert a .torrent file into an executable file. You usually have to install a client on your PC to download files shared with BitTorrent. However, you’ll do perfectly well without the client if you use Torrent2exe. What I did for my friend was I converted the OpenOffice.torrent file into an executable file and send it to him. He then runs it and it will automatically start downloading. How simple is that? If you still don’t get it, see the steps below.

1. I go to OpenOffice.org to download the OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent file.

2. I then upload the OOo_2.4.0_Win32Intel_install_en-US.exe.torrent file to Torrent2exe to have it converted to an executable file. The converted executable filename becomes t2e.exe

3. I send the t2e.exe to my friend and he runs it.

4. OpenOffice starts downloading.

You can either upload the .torrent file from your computer or specify the URL of the torrent file to have it converted to executable. I found a small problem on the URL function. When the URL of the torrent file contains reserved or excluded characters such as ] [ = ? & < > etc, it will show a 404 Not Found error when it tries to convert the torrent file to exe. When this happens, you’ll need to manually change the escape sequence to normal characters.

For example, Little_Voice_%5B2007%5D.torrent. You will need to replace the %5B and %5D to [ and ] respectively. You can refer to the chart below to know which escape sequence is for which character.

Very simple isn’t it? If you have a website or blog and you offer downloads via torrent, you can provide both torrent file and executable file for you visitor’s convenient. I am sure basic computer users would appreciate it.

[ Visit Torrent2Exe ]

If you’re using a cracked version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.512 to get your Windows Update and download from Microsoft Download Center, I believe it will soon not work for you because Microsoft has updated their Windows Genuine Advantage Validation file to version 1.5.526.
I believe the one line of Javascript code you enter before using Windows Update is no longer working.


To check your version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation:
1. Go to C:\Windows\System32
2. Look for the file legitcheckcontrol.dll
3. Use your mouse to right click on the file and select Properties
4. Click on the Version tab and you will see the version number of your Windows Genuine Advantage Validation file.

eth0, a cracking group has been releasing cracks for Windows Genuine Advantage Validation also started working on the new crack very quickly and now they have Windows.Genuine.Advantage.Validation.v1.5.526.0.CRACKED-ETH0 releasing to the public.

Just extract the LegitCheckControl.dll to your C:\Windows\System32, overwrite the original LegitCheckControl.dll when prompted and you will now have a cracked version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation which enables you to use Windows Update and also downloading from Microsoft Download Center. It’s that easy!

[ Download Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.526.0 Crack ]

Note: Using cracked version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation v1.5.526.0 is against Microsoft antipiracy law. This information is only for your knowledge and you download at your own risk.

There are a lot, I mean REALLY a lot of free startup and hijack analyzer program which scans your system for all running programs, autostart locations, drivers, services and hijack points. Silent Runners, HijackThis, RunScanner, HiJackFree and AutoRuns is a few popular ones and each has their own pros and cons. Startup analyzer is a very powerful tool to remove malwares but it requires the user to have an advance computer knowledge to be able to determine which file or process is a malware.

For normal computer users who only wants to use the computer, he/she can submit the log file to forum and have it checked by experts. Have you ever wonder how does the experts in virus removing forum learn and know which file or process is a suspicious malware? Identifying malwares is not easy because the filename itself can be deceiving. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to learn how to identify malwares, here is how you can get started…


Most important factor when using startup analyzers is the ability to recognize which file is good and bad. Unless you many years of experience and very constantly checking file names, you’re not going to be able to identify the good and bad files. Who knows one day you might even accidentally remove an important file such as userinit.exe and you will no longer be able to log in to Windows. I admit that I once removed userinit.exe and I had a hard time restoring the registry entry back. Instead of removing malwares, I ended up wasting more time in restoring the damage that I’ve created.

Before making any changes with startup analyzers, always make sure you’ve done your BACKUP.

When you run any startup analyzer, it’ll take a few seconds to scan all startup entries. An example of me running AutoRuns on my computer.

As you can see, the first one is userinit.exe file located at c:\windows\system32 folder. Try searching for the filename at all these websites.