webrampage

You might have heard of the words “nulled”, “nullified” or “null”, if you are into scripts. Well it’s a word given to a commercial script which is up for sale, but someone got the script somehow and removed the anti-piracy protection for other people to use it without actually buying it.

Detailed explanation

Okay companies try to make sure that someone doesn’t buy their script and allow other people to use the script for free. One of the most common ways to make sure this doesn’t happen is by putting something called a “callback”. After you install the script, it sends information (like your URL, version, license number, etc.) to the company. Then the company can check if a license was bought for that URL or not. If not, then the company can close your site or do whatever they can by taking you to court. You can just remove those callback codes and it won’t send any information to the company. Now you have a nulled script which actually works the same, but is safe to use if you didn’t buy it.

Who “nulls” scripts?

Well there are groups who null scripts and release them on their site for people to download them for free. And even you can null scripts if you know how. For example, the script was made in PHP and you are really good at PHP. You can then read through the codes and you’ll know which codes to remove.

Is it safe to use nulled scripts?

Now you can’t be so sure that a script has been nulled properly or someone just got the original script and released it as a nulled one. So, make sure that your source is reliable. Plus if someone reports your site to the company then the company might be able to tell if the script you are using is licensed or not.

There might be times when you get confused on which browser you should use, or maybe you just stuck to one browser for years and didn’t really care about checking out the other browsers. Well it can actually get confusing as the browsers keep adding new features and try not to fall behind. Like I kept switching between Internet Explorer (also called IE) and Firefox. Well there’s been a great war over this in 90s, but not between IE and Firefox. It was between IE and Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Navigator was the most widely used browser in the 90s and Microsoft had just started working on IE 1.0 which was released later as part of Windows 95 Plus! Pack in the August of 1995. Both Netscape and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers as fast as they could. They added new features, but didn’t really care about fixing the bugs and so it was a time of unstable browsers. Microsoft started to win the first browser war as they supported scripting and CSS, IE was also the default browser in all Windows (95% of the people used Windows) and most of all, Microsoft was a bigger company than Netscape and that means, they had more money to develop their browser. And in 1997, IE was also the default browser on Macs for five years.

IE won the first browser war, Netscape fell from 85% to less than 1%. And IE is now being used by 95% of the people. Then the second browser war begun. Now it was between IE and Firefox. Firefox was basically an experimental project of Mozilla, started by Dave Hyatt and Dave Ross. Right now, we don’t know which browser will win the second browser war. But at the moment, IE is on the lead as Firefox has only about 16% of the market share (it’s the second most popular browser). And if you are thinking about Opera and Safari. Don’t worry, most people don’t even know they exist.

I think that IE is great for security while Firefox has some features like you can choose from about 2000 add-ons, change the theme and installing plugins are fast and easy. Firefox has it’s anti-phishing feature, but still it doesn’t make me feel as safe and secure as IE does. Plus, Firefox might have some privacy issues. Yeah because it sends out information to Google to check if the web page is safe to browse and that’s basically how their anti-phishing works. Well I’ll look into this and post more about it.

I would suggest that you go with Firefox if you are into web developing or like to do something more than just checking your email and surfing the web, because it has some really great add-ons. And it’s always good to keep both, IE and Firefox installed on your computer if you are web designer/developer, since you need to see if your pages work and look good on both browsers.

By the way, here is some interesting stuff. Okay in 1997, the IE team had a big party in San Fransisco to celebrate the release of IE 4.0 and they had this big 10 feet IE logo. And after the party they put the big logo in front of the Netscape office and it also had a sign saying, “From the IE team”. Then the Netscape team had their dinosaur mascot hold a sign reading, “Netscape 75, Microsoft 18″ (representing the market distribution at that time). Another interesting thing is that the IE team and Firefox team are so nice to each other. They worked together on making Firefox compatible with Vista, and IE team sent a cake to Mozilla to congratulate them on Firefox 2.0. Though Bill Gates criticized Firefox by commenting, “so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?”.

Millions of spam emails are sent out everyday worldwide. Everyone gets spam and I’m pretty sure that you also get spam once in a while, at least. You might wonder how this spam gets to your inbox. Well the answer is pretty simple, spammers send them to you. But how do the spammers get your email address?

Well it’s pretty obvious that spammers would need a huge list of email addresses to start spamming. First of all, there are companies who sell millions of valid email addresses. Thinking where those companies get the email addresses? Well they have programs that surf the web looking specifically for the telltale “@” sign that tells them it is an email address. These programs are called spambots. Then there are sites set up to get email addresses. Such as a sites asks you to type in your email address to win $1 million. Most people would have an idea that this is a spam but sometimes they still give it a shot.

Another source of these email addresses would be chat rooms, newsgroups, etc. where new users often leave their email addresses. Then there are also sites that sell email addresses to those companies. Like when you are buying a product, it might say that please uncheck this check box if you do not wish to receive emails from our partners or sponsors. If you did not uncheck it or misread then your email address would be sold.

Spammers also attack email servers of large email hosting companies like Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. And one of the common attacks is a dictionary attack where a spambot connects to the email server and submits a lot of randomly generated email address then checks for valid ones. Hotmail didn’t have any protection against these attacks back in 2003 and so people used to get a lot more spam on Hotmail than now.

After a list of email addresses is created spammers use programs to send spam emails and they use their own servers to do this or use zombie computers to do this so that they cannot be traced and blocked.

Well if you want to stop getting spam emails then you could do some basic stuff such as put a contact form on your site rather than just putting your email address and never give your email address to strangers or leave your email addresses in chat rooms, newsgroups or put them in suspicious forms.

If have a spammer gets your email address then he/she would probably share it other spammers and leading endless spam into your inbox. So think again before sharing your email address!