550 5.7.1 Mail from 188.240.44.77 blocked using Trend Micro RBL+. Please see http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup?ip_address=188.240.44.77Fine, I understand, and I do remember I tried to test my outgoing SMTP connections with another email address hosted on anonymousdomain.com. At the same time I noticed that the Google servers were delivering just fine my mails, without any issues.
I do acknowledge my actions were not ethical, moral, maybe not even legal to do in some countries (running mail tests on other people's addresses).
As a step forward, I shall contact the Trend Microsystems http://www.mail-abuse.com team to inform them that those mails were legitimate and for testing purposes, hoping I shall be removed from the black list.
During this time I faced the need to switch between various proxy switches on my computers and laptops. Hotels with specific proxies, public spaces without proxy, work network specific settings, etc.
At the end it became quite annoying to switch proxies between sessions, etc., getting disconnected from work VPNs, hanging between proxies while roaming between my work desk and public places.
And all this must come to an end... hence, I wrote a small Proxy switcher, which simply can to one of the following settings:
- disable the proxy;
- set the proxy to a prespecified value;
- proxy management:
- Add proxy authority with description;
- Edit/add proxy based on a pre-existing setting;
- Delete a proxy setting
As of now I tested the proxy on my Windows 7 with DOT NET 4; further on I shall continue testing this application also on other platforms.
The application can be found at http://static.sorescu.eu/Applications/WebProxySwitcher-1203280028/WebProxySwitcher.exe.
WebProxySwitcher.cs
I hope I put the proper values at the proper place.
Are you curious what does it mean? Check and execute the code.
inbox.txt reply.txt DecryptSecretMesage.java
I took a look in the logs of my ad-hoc SMTP server (running on the main domain) sorescu.eu and I noticed a series of denied authentications.
I did not understand what happened, but I saw the user and the password list encoded in Base64. After I collected all the encoded values, I was curious which credentials were tested. I shall present below the application that I wrote to help me in decoding them, and, the list of passwords used to log in.
Java Base64 decoder code:
Worthy saying, before listing the password list:
- the client presented itself as GOD-E49531CFA2A (really?!?);
- the client was a bot that was simply dumping plain text to port 25, as it continued sending the mail spam, without even looking that the access was denied;
- my SMTP server and relay are the product of one white-night, but this test is a first realistic test of my server;
- many more things remain to be implemented in server, including white and black lists, including changing the password with a strong one;
Base64Decoder.java passwords.txt
Few days ago a colleague of mine got an almost-impossible task: fix a bug in a Java application that had to print an HTML document built ad-hoc, and the customer was complaining that when printing, in place of printing, it was throwing various JavaScript errors.
The problem was that once the Java application was loading the JExplorer component, the application was running the code (I don't remember by heart the code, but it is close to reality).
And, the situation to be worsened, the bug was appearing only sometimes, on some machines, at some times, being hard to identify and understand a pattern.
After two hours of drinking coffee (vital brain combustion ingredient, obviously) and lots of endless investigations, just like an inspiration, I remembered that the JExplorer publishes an API through which I can tell it to save the document.
At the end, the bug was fixed with a very simple line of code.
Before.java After.java
- to write from scratch a minimal java-based application for her;
- to give her my application, but which was relying on a complex code base of more than 80MB + Java runtime environment.
- her Java version was some ancient version, so I needed to recompile the source for her version; as a consequence, I needed also to go back to the old style without generics, but the tragedy was that I had to wrap in the application also components from Java 6 that I was relying on (the GUI automation framework from Sun);
- I had to give her (she is not very technical person) an USB stick with multiple versions and files, and I was thinking how to make her understand how to start up a Java application, knowing nothing about her computer configuration.
- download the application Screen Capture (270 KB size);
- execute it (you don't need to save it in a specific location, or to install it);
- it should open a white photo camera icon.
- right-click on the white icon and choose Select Folder;
- once done, the application will save the location in the user's application private registry; so the next time the application is opened, it knows the location to save;
- Note: if you attempt to save a desktop image without selecting the first time on the given machine the location, you will be prompted to select the location.
- to capture the desktop, just click once on the tray icon;
- the icon will transform in green suggesting that the saving process is executed, and after a very short period it becomes back white;
- Right click on the white icon and in the dialogue box choose the Quit button, which, for feedback, will transform the white icon in red, and after, the application should silently quit.
- The image will be saved in the PNG format (smaller format, and loseless quality - in case you want to reuse the image for machine processing and image recognition);
- The image name will be built based on the time the image was captured, containing the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and hundredth of second, like in: 12.02.20-22.11.04.50.PNG.
DesktopCapture.cs
I created a new subdomain named My.Sorescu.Eu - as the central place for applications and tools that should help you stay active, competitive, and in shape in a more and more competitive world.
Log in, check, or just come back in few weeks to see the progress.
Soon, more information will be available also on dragos-matei.sorescu.eu.