Ways To Identify Safe Website

On the whole Internet, there are approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed. Have you ever wondered to know the reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to identify safe websites on the Web.

1. WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):

WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly. A snapshot of WOT ratings for gohacking.com is shown below:

As shown in the above snapshot, the reputation of each website is shown in terms of 4 components where green means excellent, yellow warns users to be cautious and red indicates potential danger.

Trustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.

Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.

Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.

Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.

In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.

2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:

McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it fromwww.siteadvisor.com.

3. StopBadware:

Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go tohttp://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.

4. Google Pagerank:

Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.

However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.

PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

I hope you like this article. Waiting for your comments….

How To Install Windows 7 From USB Drive

Installing Windows from a USB flash drive has several advantages – First of all, the overall speed of the installation process will increase significantly, carrying a USB stick is much more convenient than a DVD, and finally it becomes possible to install the OS even on those systems that do not have a DVD drive, such as a netbook.

In this post, I will show you how to load the Windows installation on to your USB flash drive and make it bootable just like the DVD.

Tools Required:

1. USB flash drive with a minimum capacity of 4 GB.

2. Windows 7 set-up DVD.

 

Step-1: Plug-in your USB flash drive and backup all the existing data in it.

 

Step-2: Open the command prompt. If you are using Windows 7/Vista then open it with administrator rights*.

* Goto Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Right-click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”.

 

Step 3: In the command prompt, type in the following command:

DISKPART

This will start the Microsoft DiskPart utility as shown below:

Now issue the following command:

LIST DISK

This will show you a list of  available disks on your system. Disk 0 is usually the hard disk. In my case, Disk 5 is the USB drive (this can be a different one in your case). Now issue the command as shown below:

SELECT DISK 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: In the above command, 5 is the USB drive number on my system. If you have a different number on your system, then you need to replace 5 with that number.

 

Step-4: Now issue the following list of commands one by one as shown below:

CLEAN

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

SELECT PARTITION 1

ACTIVE

FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK

ASSIGN

EXIT

Minimize the command prompt and proceed to the next step.

 

Step 5: Insert the Windows 7/Vista installation disc and note down the “drive letter” of your DVD drive. In my case, it is “H:”. Now type the following list of commands as shown below:

H: CD BOOT


CD BOOT


BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 M:(NOTE: M: is your USB drive letter)


EXIT

Step-6: Copy the contents of your Windows 7/Vista installation disk into the USB flash drive.

That’s it! Your USB stick is now ready to boot and install the OS for you. Don’t forget to enable the “USB Boot” option and change the “boot priority to USB device from hard disk” in your BIOS settings.

How To Hack Symbian S60 Phones

If you own a Nokia Symbian S60 phone, you will most likely be aware of the fact that it is not possible to install applications on it unless they are signed using a valid certificate. Have you been trying to install applications on your S60 3rd or 5th edition phone but ending up getting a certificate error? At times, this can be really annoying; but here is a smart solution to this problem!

Here in this post, I will show you how to hack your Symbian S60 3rd or 5th edition smartphone, so as to modify the phone’s firmware and completely bypass the mandatory signing requirement. So, once you are done with this one time hack, you should be able to install any compatible application including unsigned and those with an expired certificate.

 

What is the Need for Signing Applications?

From the 3rd edition onwards, all the Symbian S60 applications need to be signed in order to ensure their integrity, so that it would not be possible for a third party to tamper with the application. Also, signing ensures that you always install applications from a trusted source.

However, there are many freeware and beta applications that come unsigned as the developers cannot afford to buy a symbian certificate. Hence, it can be a real nightmare for the users who need to install such applications on their phones. So, here is a step-by-step procedure to hack your phone and permanently disable this security feature.

 

1. Download HelloOX2 V2.03 or the latest version from the HelloOX2 Ofiicial Website.

HelloOX2 is an excellent tool to hack Symbian S60 3rd, 5th and Symbian^3 smartphones which makes it possible to install a root certificate by gaining full access to the phone’s system files. With this capability, you can install anything you want on your phones without the need to worry about the annoying certificate error!

2. The signed version of HelloOX2 demands for a donation and hence, only the unsigned version is available for free download. So, if you have the unsigned version, you need to sign it before installing on your phone. In order to sign any application, you need to have the certificate and the key file which can be obtained as follows:

• Go to the OPDA Website, get registered and login to your account.
• Click on the “Apply Certificate” tab, enter the model number and the IMEI of your phone and then click on “Submit and Upload” button.
• It will usually take up 24 hours for your certificate and key file to be generated and uploaded. To check the status of your certificate click on “My Certificate” tab. If the certificate is ready for the download you will see something as follows:

 

• Download the certificate and the key file on to your computer. Also download the SisSigner tool to sign your HelloOX2 application.
• Open the SisSigner, load the HelloOX2.sis, certificate and the key file as shown below and click on “Sign”. Leave the “Key File Password” field blank.

• Your HelloOX2 application is now signed and ready for the installation.

3. Install the signed HelloOX2 application on your phone and run it to start the hacking process, which is completely automatic. Within a minute your phone will be hacked. Once this is done, say goodbye to the annoying certificate error and install any application.

I hope you like this post. Express your opinion through comments. Enjoy!!!

How To Change IP Address

How to change your IP address in less than a minute? The following trick gives you a step-by-step procedure to change your IP address. 

 

 

 

-> Click on “Start” in the bottom left hand corner of screen.

-> Click on “Run”.

-> Type in “command” and hit ok.You should now be at an MSDOS prompt screen.

-> Type “ipconfig /release” just like that, and hit “enter”.

-> Type “exit” and leave the prompt.

-> Right-click on “Network Places” or “My Network Places” on your desktop.

-> Click on “properties”.

You should now be on a screen with something titled “Local Area Connection”, or something close to that.

-> Right click on “Local Area Connection” and click “properties”.

-> Double-click on the “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” from the list under the “General” tab.

-> Click on “Use the following IP address” under the “General” tab.

-> Create an IP address (It doesn’t matter what it is. I just type 1 and 2 until i fill the area up).

-> Press “Tab” and it should automatically fill in the “Subnet Mask” section with default numbers.

-> Hit the “Ok” button here.

-> Hit the “Ok” button again. You should now be back to the “Local Area Connection” screen.

-> Right-click back on “Local Area Connection” and go to properties again.

-> Go back to the “TCP/IP” settings.

-> This time, select “Obtain an IP address automatically”.

-> Hit “Ok”.

-> Hit “Ok” again.

-> You now have a new IP address.

Some ISPs do not support this type of procedure and hence there are chances of getting back the same old IP address even after trying this hack. In this case you need to switch off the modem and then switch it on to get the new IP address.

**This trick only works for dynamic IP.