Free Facebook T-Shirt Scam Spreading Virally

Few days I ago.. I logged in to my FB Account.. I found one of my friend posted on his wall that he got facebook tshirt.. I really liked it.. :-)

I clicked on that link too.. I was about to become another victim of that scam.. I show next page as below..

It's Facebook Birthday.. !! I wasn't knowing that.. there is not any official facebook link.. but I continue with next page.. To get Tshirt click here.. I clicked..

see the page carefully.. when does facebook start to put google ads? :-) lolz.. something weird.. something scam.. let's google it.. :-)

http://techpp.com  saying

"These Facebook scams hardly ever fail to amuse me. I say this for two major reasons. One, there are always enough gullible users, no matter how many scams have embarrassed them and two, Facebook hasn’t really found out a way to tackle these spammers. Tackling might be far fetched, I doubt if they even have an intent to keep off these spammers. Well, the biggest Facebook scam underway right now is about Free Facebook T-shirts and I’m seeing a lot of not-so-gullible users getting trapped this time around."

Another site saying there are two scams.. another pic with facebook tshirt..

Uffo.. this pic made 80% of facebook users to click on it.. nice way..



Hacker attacks targeting Facebook are endless. The most recent one proved that scammers have enough of imagination to create more and more scams with different subjects. You never knew that you have a secret mobile e-mail address? Well, you can now learn about it via the legitimate Facebook page or via a special video, created by hackers in order to make it easier to steal your data.

A Facebook T-shirt seemed like a big enough reason for users to visit an especially created by hackers web page, that claimed to be celebrating Facebook's 7th birthday. With the tricky comment "WOW!! Got a free Facebook T-SHIRT :)). Unpacking it now. Get it here : [link]", scammers have managed to attract the attention of Facebook lovers. To make it even more luring, they stated that there 1.9 million official Facebook T-shirts - enough for the fastest Facebook users.

The procedure of claiming a T-shirts is the following: users first have to verify they have got a Facebook account.

Then the reason for the attack becomes clear - you are prompted to visit Facebook Mobile and copy (then paste) your SECRET mobile e-mail address. This is where you should stop and think, because this address, if revealed to others, can be used to write status posts, upload photos and videos - all that on your own page and on your behalf!

That is the reason why scammers need your address - to abuse your account. To make things look even more legitimate, and to help you out giving them your secret data, hackers have been bold enough to create a YouTube video with instructions of where exactly your secret mobile e-mail address is and how to fill it in in their form.

In this scam, cyber criminals have been clever enough to take advantage of the fact that a lot of users do not know what the secret mobile e-mail address is, how to use it and why they need to keep it secret. If you have become a victim of the Facebook's 7th Birthday Celebration scam, please change your Facebook Mobile upload e-mail address by following these steps:

Now the main thing: Friends whose profile has now infected with "Free Facebook t-shirt" Scam,

Solution to get rid from this scam

To fix this, 

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/mobile/?v=photos

2. click on "Send me my upload email" which will open one dialog.

3. In this dialog box click on the "refresh your upload email" link in the bottom.

Please note that you can refresh this email address only a limited number of times.

Also go to
http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications
and delete all unwanted applications. Keep safe :)

This threat might have not reached you, however, keep in mind that such threats appear constantly and the next bait might be luring enough for you to make you click. It stands to reason that should be extremely cautious when you are prompted to give away your account information - of all sorts.

Do try-catch really effect runtime performance in .Net application?

Recently, a friend told me that someone had told him that writing a try-catch block in C# resulted in a "huge penalty" in terms of performance compared to if you had not written it.
I was little worrying if that statement is true or not.. I have googled it and read many articles.. also made few small applications.. when no expection occurs and expection occurs.
That is, merely writing such a block actually hurt program performance, even if an exception was never thrown. He didn't believe this was true, and rightly so-it's completely wrong.

Inside a .Net Assembly

A .Net assembly, if we ignore various headers, consists of three things:

• Bytecode: a sequence of low-level instructions that specify the body of a method
• Metadata: a set of tables, a little bit like a database, describing higher level constructs such as classes, methods, signatures and so forth
• Heaps: places where string constants and other such things are stored

That is, bytecode is what we actually execute and the rest is there to describe the extra details. To give you an example of the interplay between them, consider a method call. The bytecode stream contains the call instruction, followed by a method token, which is actually an index into the methods table. The methods table in turn allows us to find out where the bytecode for the method we're calling starts, so we can execute it.

(As an aside, these lookups wouldn't be all that expensive to do per call, though in reality they likely won't actually happen more than once per call site, unless it's done through reflection or a delegate. That's because when the CLR JIT-compiles the bytecode, it can compile the method call down to call instructions at the CPU level that refer directly to the method being called. You don't need to know this bit; it's just here for the curious.)

How Exception Handlers Are Stored

The .Net CLR has a concept known as a "protected region". A protected region is a sequence of instructions that has an associated handler. In C# or VB.NET, the instructions in a protected region correspond to code in a try block. There are various types of handlers, including typed ones (that catch only a certain type of exception) and finally ones. Note that a try...catch...finally will result in two protected regions at the CLR level, one for the catch and one for the finally. The protected regions will cover the exact same sequence of instructions, just have different handler addresses.

Each method that has protected regions comes with a table of them. For each protected region, it contains four entries:

• The starting instruction in the bytecode for this protected region
• The number of bytes worth of instructions from the starting point that are protected
• The type of handler
• The location in the bytecode of the handler

They are ordered with innermost handlers coming first.

What happens at runtime

Here is the important part when it comes to performance when an exception is not thrown. Since the protected regions are stored in a table and are not in the bytecode, and because the CLR does not need to worry about the exception handlers unless an exception is thrown, then there is no runtime penalty for having a try...catch block. For finally handlers it is a little different, because we do need to run those even when we don't have exceptions. However, since we can compute what we will need to run when statically, the JIT compiler can still emit code that jumps to the finally handler at the appropriate time, making the execution overhead of one of those most likely just a jump and a return.

So that's most of the answer to the question that was asked, but for interest let's take a look at what happens when an exception is thrown. Provided the current method has protected regions, you scan through the table to find if there are any that cover the instruction where the exception was thrown and that are capable of handling it (they are looking for an exception of the correct type, for example). If there are multiple nested handlers that could handle the exception, the ordering of innermost first means that we will find the correct handler.

If we find a handler, we execute it. If we don't find one, we move down to the next method in the call stack and check if it has a suitable handler, keeping going until we find one (or we discover that the exception is user-unhandled and terminate the program). This means that the cost of throwing and catching an exception is dependent on how far down the call stack you have to go to find a handler.

From this we can conclude that .Net is optimized for the case where you do not get exceptions. Since exceptions are intended to happen only in exceptional (that is, unexpected) circumstances, this is a sensible design decision. If you inclined to use exceptions for ordinary flow control, this should give you another reason not to.

And the cost of a try...catch block is...

So what can we conclude? The overall cost of a try...catch block that never handles an exception is a few bytes of memory - or at worst a few words - for the entry in the protected regions table. The only possible runtime penalty is the extra time to load those extra few bytes into memory. Since they are stored way away from the JITted bytecode stream, it's highly unlikely you're going to incur any additional cache-misses at runtime as a result of the handler too. Thus, the cost is essentially nothing.

The cost of not handling an exception that you should have may well be that your program crashes. This results in unhappy customers, a hit to your reputation and development time to go and do a bug-fix, which will almost certainly be much greater than if you had put it in there in the first place. Obviously, protecting code that can not throw an exception under any circumstances is a waste of your development time. But otherwise, it's best to be safe rather than sorry, safe in the knowledge that even if an exception never does occur in that bit of code, it's not really costing anything anyway.

Courtesy:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/TechOff/471678-try-finally-as-costly-as-try-catch-
http://www.programmersheaven.com/user/pheaven/blog/175-Do-trycatch-blocks-hurt-runtime-performance/
http://msmvps.com/blogs/peterritchie/archive/2007/06/22/performance-implications-of-try-catch-finally.aspx

Ping and ICMP

First of all what is ICMP?

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. It is chiefly used by the operating systems of networked computers to send error messages indicating, for example, that a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be reached. ICMP can also be used to relay query messages. It is assigned protocol number


ICMP differs from transport protocols such as TCP and UDP in that it is not typically used to exchange data between systems, nor is it regularly employed by end-user network applications (with the exception of some diagnostic tools like ping and traceroute).

You will come across following ICMP replies when you ping a particular IP.

When a PING is successful you get a reply back from the host showing its IP address and other information such as the time it took for the reply to go through.

TTL Expired in Transit
The TTL value determines the maximum amount of time an IP packet may live in the network without reaching its destination. It is effectively a bound on the number of routers an IP packet may pass through before being discarded. This message indicates that the TTL expired in transit. Number of required hops exceeds TTL. Increase TTL by using the ping -i switch.

Destination Host Unreachable
The host that you are trying to ping is down or is not operating on the network. A local or remote route does not exist for destination host. Modify the local route table or notify the router administrator.

Request Timed Out
The ping command timed out because there was no reply from the host. No Echo Reply messages were received due to network traffic, failure of the ARP request packet filtering, or router error. Increase the wait time using the ping -w switch.

Unknown Host
The IP Address or the Host Name does not exist in the network or the destination host name cannot be resolved. Verify name and availability of DNS servers.


This is just to explain different kind of ICMP replies I came across while reading about networking ping and tracert commands..

Send Data on a Right Click to Your Desired Folder

Whenever you attach a removable disk and want to send some items in it, you have option either you select the required files and do a CTRL + C, open the removable disk and do a CTRL + V

or

you select the required files right click on it and there you find “Send To” option. In “Send To” you find the name of removable disk and you simply send the items into it. 

Well, What if i get the name of my own desired folder there which I use frequently for keeping my stuff.

Now in this post I will be telling you how you can create your own folder with in any name in “Send To” option so that whenever you will copy any files or folders, you will simply send them to your folder instead of using CTRL + C and CTRL + V.

• Firstly you have to access hidden files. So change your view settings to make all hidden files visible. Tools -> folder options -> view (tab) and select the show hidden files and folders also uncheck hide system files and folder (hide protected operating system file).

• Go to My Computer  and locate Send To folder.(In Windows XP : C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\SendTo In Windows Vista and 7 C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo)

• Now in Send To folder Right click -> create shortcut. Give the folder path you want to access for Send To purpose. Finish shortcut process.

• Now your customized “Send To” option is ready to go.

Dragging the contents of a cell in MS Excel not working : Resolved

Today while working with Excel.. I was trying to drag and auto fill serial number. but it didn't work..

That plus sign wasn't coming when I select 2-3 cells so after searching on net I found following solution.

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button Button image, and then click Excel Options.
2. In the Advanced category, under Editing options, select or clear the Enable fill handle and cell drag-and-drop check box to turn drag-and-drop editing on or off.

Note To help prevent replacing existing data when you drag the fill handle, make sure that the Alert before overwriting cells check box is selected. If you do not want Excel to display a message about overwriting non-blank cells, you can clear this check box.


Hope it helps.