Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

MySpace has won its lawsuit against infamous spammer Sanford Wallace, dubbed the “Spam King”. MySpace was awarded a legal judgment after Wallace ignored numerous requests to turn over documents and ultimately failed to show up in court. The suit was filed last year, accusing Wallace of running a phishing scam to access MySpace profiles and then using them to spam thousands of other users in an effort to get them to visit his website. Wallace claimed that since he was not accepting mail or packages, he had missed all the notifications of his court dates. The court didn’t buy it.

MORE »

An anonymous programmer going by the name “John Wane” has claimed to have cracked Yahoo’s CAPTCHA software. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) software is used by most major websites, including Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, and others, to prevent automated systems from creating thousands of accounts to send spam with. Everyone’s seen it. When you register on a site, you’re presented with an image containing a jumbled “code” and you must enter it correctly to continue.  “John Wane” posted code for a decoder he claimed could get around that step and has an accuracy rate of 35%. 

MORE »

TorPark is a new browser that has been developed by an activist group for human rights and privacy called Hactivismo. The new browser is based on securing user privacy. It works off of the network of Tor servers referred to commonly as “Onion Servers.” The Tor servers mask your identity by rerouting your web traffic through any number of different Tor services based all over the world. The biggest difference with the new Torpark is that it randomizes the servers that are used to more efficiently mask your web traffic.

One of the other large benefits of using this new browser is that it is based off of Firefox and is a stand alone program.  So you can store it on your flash drive and take it anywhere you want without worrying about your location being compromised in any way. Torpark is nearly 10 MB so it takes up a little space but not enough to really make a difference. The program runs quickly (slower then Firefox), but still works just as well which is always handy.

TorPark will also display your current IP address to let you know what you are broadcasting to web sites that you visit. It allows you to manually change servers if the one you are using is running too slow or if you feel the random need to use a different one.

They also have a sister project, called Torbird, that allows you to send email from the same network of Tor servers that the TorPark software uses. This feature almost seems geared towards spammers and may be abused.  Hopefully they implement some kind of prevention mechanism in the future to ensure that spammers aren’t abusing Torbird.

Read [Techfilter]