Earlier today, several Twitter users received emails from Twitter prompting them to change their passwords because of suspicious activity that appeared to have resulted from phishing. Turns out it was something different from a traditional phishing scam altogether, and it involved BitTorrent.
From the Twitter Status blog:
It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra – security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter.
Yet again a good reminder to choose strong (and different) passwords for each site—and if you have a hard time remembering all of them, stick to a secure password management solution.
Saving something as a PDF file is a great way to preserve it for future reference or for sharing with others, without risking the site changing before you look at it again. PDFMyURL makes it easy to convert sites to PDF.
Point PDFMyURL at a website URL and it will convert the site into a PDF document. Not only can you do a simple conversion just by plugging in a URL but you can also modify the PDF with a wide variety of flags—see the advanced menu for a full list—that let you set the page orientation and size, header information, print orientation, and more. PDFMyURL also has a bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar for easy access to the PDF creation service.
PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn’t watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF. Have a favorite tool for PDF conversion or a bookmarklet that makes life easier? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Windows/Linux: It’s one thing to be able to quickly search through file names using a program like Everything, but it leaves you out in the cold when it comes to deep searching documents. DocFetcher can help by indexing document contents.
If you need to search within a text document instead of simply searching for the name of the file, DocFetcher is a great application available for both Windows and Linux to do so. DocFetcher doesn’t simply index the words and leave you to pick through them, you can use a variety of parameters like including or excluding search terms using the +/- signs, searching metadata, using wild cards, and specifying file extensions.
More well known document search tools exist, like Google Desktop, but for those who don’t want the bulk or potential invasion of privacy that comes with using software like Google Desktop, DocFetcher is a lightweight alternative. DocFetcher is freeware and available for Windows and Linux. Have a favorite tool for deep massaging your data? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
Tagged Document management, Document Search, Downloads, Featured Download, Linux, Search, Windows
For some, there is quite a bit of anxiety involved in switching from one email system to another. What will become of all your old emails from family/friends, your precious email attachments containing hundreds of hours of video featuring LOLCats, or …
