For the Foodie In You : Prologue

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin

Foodie: A person that spends a keen amount of attention and energy on knowing the ingredients of food, the proper preparation of food, and finds great enjoyment in top-notch ingredients and exemplary preparation.
A foodie is not necessarily a food snob, only enjoying delicacies and/or food items difficult to obtain and/or expensive foods; though, that is a variety of foodie.

This blog post is dedicated to all those who loves anything and everything about food, its mouth watering aroma, magnificent color and its delicious taste. As you might have guessed  I am a foodie too,loves absolutely  everything about food. Thought will share some of my food adventures with you all.   So watch out this space when you feel hungry ,see you all soon. For the time being check out one of my daily/weekly favorites.

 “Chicken Salad” from World of Subs & Salads Thiruvanmiyur Chennai  Image courtesy Christo { its he who ordered it 😉 }

Note: If you love Kerala delicacies watch out the following opening song from the movie “Salt N’ Pepper“, be sure to watch in the biggest screen you can find.It surely will tingle your taste buds.

Posted in For Foodies | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

New Home :)

Posted on January 12, 2012 by admin

After  long 5 years(my first post is here, though its barely anything ) I have finally decided to bid adieu  to blog-spot and be on my own 🙂  So spend a couple of bucks booked a domain name and rented some space. And here I am, with  posts exported  from blogspot and ready to go online.

This blog is the outcome of my random thoughts about technology/security/travel and food.A space to scribble something when am too bored to do anything else.

And ya keep coming back, spend some real good money here need to earn it back through ads 😀 (kidding 😉 )

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Booking tickets in IRCTC? Your Credit Card might be in risk

Posted on October 2, 2011 by rakeshmukundan
    IRCTC is India’s most popular travel site, having a monthly user turn over of over 8.4million! (as on April 2011, source)Many uses the site for their day-to-day travel needs. Despite the vast user base, IRCTC is still not upto the mark in protecting it’s users privacy, recently only they have switched to SSL!!.
As a regular train travel, I too uses IRCTC extensively, mostly uses credit card for the transactions. Recently only I have noticied that IRCTC actually stored your entire credit card number on the local machine and there is no way to opt-out other than manually deleting the history.

 Thats some serious security hole(!!), imagine the situation of a user booking tickets on public computer like Net Cafe.Its like leaving one’s credit card in the street.
Even in a private computer this practice could have serious implications(possible virus attack,trojans etc..). Its a common web programming practice not to cache sensitive entries like this, but guess IRCTC has their own practices[;)].

So what can you do to make sure that your Credit Card information is not stored?, simply delete all the private data in your browser after doing a transaction. The practice of deleting all the browser entries after finishing surfing in a Cafe is a good practice.But in case of your own personal computer this can be of big inconvenience.If you are a Firefox user there is an extension to help you out, Form History Control.It will allow you to create custom rules to delete the form entries automatically.
Install the addon and open the Form History control.Goto Clean Up and insert two entries as below one for credit card number and one for CVV number(Ya, IRCTC made sure to cache both ;)).

Make sure to check select the RegExp option to the right of Field-name else it won’t work.

Select  Perform Clean up on Browser shutdown and perform clean up when a browser tab is closed options for automatic cleaning.

Use the Preview matching entries option to see if any entry is already stored.

Now Form History Control add-on should be cleaning up your credit card entires soon after the IRCTC web-page is closed, handy method till they fix the website.

I don’t know any such tools exists for other browsers, will update this post once I found them.

Posted in Security | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Can Facebook use my name and profile picture in ads?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by rakeshmukundan
There were many speculations related to Facebook using users profile picture and social data in their own advertisements. For people concerned about their privacy please read the how to blog from F-Secure turn of this feature.

If you are a Facebook member and like a Facebook page and/or mention a Facecbook page in a wall update, Facebook can use your name and possibly your picture in ads that are shown to your friends.
In fact, your name might be appearing in Facebeook ad now saying that you like a certain brand. Facebook opts everyone into Facebook Ads. And you probably know that because you’ve read Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities so carefully
You can opt-out of letting Facebook use your name or profile picture  in ads served to your friends by going to Account.

You can read the full version of the blog here.

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