Cyber Spying Tracking Your Family's (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This is not a book about security and defending yourself from spying but the basics of why one might consider spying on other members of their family. Whether because they suspect infidelity, criminal activity or some other concern there are a lot of reasons why people might want to find out what others are doing on their computer. A very important point made in the beginning of the book is the question of the ethics of spying including the effect it has on the trust of a relationship. The authors also point out that sometimes spying is much less of an ethical consideration. Sometimes it might be part of protecting your children from online predators or other real dangers.
The book covers the basics of spying including creating a plan, getting the right software or hardware to implement the plan and actual implementation. The authors do a good job of pointing out how we leave tracks behind and how to get rid of those tracks as well as how to exploit them.
Written for the novice user it starts at the very beginning with things like how to open the command prompt and running explorer. From there it goes on to look at more basic as well as intermediate level techniques. The authors even include information on some rather advanced software such as ethereal (one of my personal favorites). It does give you a solid understanding of what the different software is capable of doing but really doesn't provide a thorough treatment of any of them. In the case of Ethereal and Snort both have complete books written about how to use them effectively so obviously part of a chapter barely scratches the surface of what can be done.
For the most part it teaches the easier ways of finding out information without using difficult advanced tools. It includes how to access areas where passwords, usernames, etc. are stored as well as directories and files that do not show up in explorer unless you know how to hand-enter the path to them.
Whether you are spying on someone's web browsing, e-mail, internet chat, or instant messaging the basics are all here. They even include information on how to remove evidence of your activities and ways to tell if you are being watched.
These techniques are mainly for local network spying and not for use over the Internet. Although still subject to many ethical and other considerations, for the purpose of finding out what is going on within your local network Cyber Spying is highly recommended.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Cyber Spying Tracking Your Family's (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives

This book shows everyday computer users how to become cyber-sleuths. It takes readers through the many different issues involved in spying on someone online. It begins with an explanation of reasons and ethics, covers the psychology of spying, describes computer and network basics, and takes readers step-by-step through many common online activities, and shows what can be done to compromise them. The book's final section describes personal privacy and counter-spy techniques. By teaching by both theory and example this book empowers readers to take charge of their computers and feel confident they can be aware of the different online activities their families engage in.Expert authors have worked at Fortune 500 companies, NASA, CIA, NSA and all reside now at Sytex, one of the largest government providers of IT services. *Targets an area that is not addressed by other books: black hat techniques for computer security at the personal computer level. *Targets a wide audience: personal computer users, specifically those interested in the online activities of their families.

Click here for more information about Cyber Spying Tracking Your Family's (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives

Read More...

Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won't Tell You about the Internet Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Overall this is a good book. The first part is sorta stupid, though. It talks mainly about how not to only listen to one person but to get information from multiple sources. It could be summed up in about a page.
Chapter 4 talks about buying computers and software. It helped me out by giving me some tricks to do next time I buy a computer.
Chapter 5 tells you about keeping your files secure with encryption. It tells you about some different types of encryption algorithms and how to write your own encryption programs. It also shows you how to play some dirty tricks. It talked about using anonymous remailers to send anonymous email and talked about just how anonymous they were. It even told you how to surf the web anonymously so that people couldn't receive information about your computer, browser, and more.
Chapter 6 told about phone phreaking history such as captian crunch. Wallace then goes on by telling you possibly things that could've happened but didn't. When telling these stories he tries to make himself sound like a phreaker but he didn't even do anything. Then, he tells your some really obvious stuff like "To start phone phreaking, you need access to a telephone." and "phreaking from your own phone will let the telephone company trace it to your house." I don't know if he couldn't think of anything else or he thinks you are really stupid. After that, he talks about phreaking color boxes and then goes on to voice mail hacking. Then, he talks about cellular phone fraud and tv satellite descrambling.
Chapter 7 talks about defeating windoz 3.1/95/98 screen saver passwords which if you ever tried you should've done it on the first or second try. It also talks about cracking program passwords and then it goes on to defeating parental control software. If you can't access certain web pages, Wallace tells you how by having the html code emailed to you. He also shows you how to read banned books in secret.
Chapter 8 talks about harassing online services, how pedophiles stalk innocent children and what you can do to stop them. He tells you about generating fake credit card numbers and making your own online harassment program.
Chapter 9 talks about stopping spam. It shows you multiply ways to take revenge on spammers. If the spammer used a forged email address, Wallace shows you how to track down the spammer like two magnets attracting each other.
Chapter 10 shows some pictures of acctual hacked web sites and how to hack them.
Chapter 11 shows you how to track people down by using specific things about them. For example if you only had their SSC# how you could still find them no matter where they were. At the end of the chapter, he shows you how to hide yourself if you don't want to be tracked down or how to let someone easily find you if, for example, you gave your child up for adoption years ago and you don't want to contact him/her but you do want to let them find you if they ever wanted you.
Chapter 12 shows you about ConGames on the Internet. It shows you how to do them and how to protect yourself from them.
Chapter 13 Viruses Part I. ( I heard that the plural form of virus is exposed to be virii, just like the plural form or fungus is fungi but in the book it is written viruses so that's how I will spell it.)
This chapter expains what viruses are, the parts of them, how to tell if you have a virus on your computer, the different infection methods, if all viruses are bad and how to learn more about them.
Chapter 14 Viruses Part II.
This chapter shows the different methods of how an antivirus program works and what to do if you find a virus ( If you say any idiot knows that if you find one you should delete it, but you could also send it in to an antivirus program if you think it is a uncommon virus, keep a copy of it, modify the virus and make a new one and many other things.)
Chapter 15 tells you about writing your own computer virus. Wallace also tells you to watch out because viruses sometimes attack their own creators. He tells you some true things about antivirus companies like how they hire virus writers to help them detect viruses (makes sense, doesn't it) and how that their isn't any evidence of this, but that they may hire the virus writers to write a virus that only they have the antidote for so people will buy their program to detect it.
Chapter 16 is about Java applets. I haven't read all of it but so far so good.
Appendice A is the glossary with a decent amount of terms covered in the book. I really haven't used it too much because I never needed to.
Appendice B is Visual Basic 3.0 ( a very easy programming language that I suggest you learn ) source code for altering Mega$hack. A program he discusses in 12. ( it is used by cons but he alters it so they get a taste of their own medicine.) The source code is written on the page so you will have to type it into your Visual Basic Compiler.
Appendice C is about additional resources. It is compiled of online magazines, webpages, hacker conventions and more.
Summary: This book is for you if you are interested in the above things. The websites and newsgroups in the book lead to nothing except for a few like metacrawler that he obviously was paid to advertise for. If you are still unsure after unreading all the reviews, go to a local bookstore and see if they have this book there. If they do then look at it, see if you like it and if so, compare the prices of Amazon plus the shipping and time to the prices of the bookstore. I hope that this review helped you because I know what it is like to have one person rate it 5 stars and another person rate it 1 star. Sinse this is a pain, I figured that instead of giving my opinion, I would tell you what the book had in it.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won't Tell You about the Internet

Click here for more information about Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won't Tell You about the Internet

Read More...

XSS Attacks: Cross Site Scripting Exploits and Defense Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)XSS Attacks earns 4 stars for being the first book devoted to Cross Site Scripting and for rounding up multiple experts on the topic. The authors are synonymous with attacking Web applications and regularly share their vast expertise via their blogs and tools. However, XSS Attacks suffers the same problems found whenever Syngress rushes a book to print -- nonexistent editing and uneven content. I found XSS Attacks to be highly enlightening, but I expect a few other books on the topic arriving later this year could be better.
First, as Tadaka mentioned, ch 3 is the best written part of the book. In fact, the author of ch 3 should have written the entire book. There is a difference between an author of a tool, an author of a blog, and an author of a book. The author of ch 3 clearly knows how to make a clear argument over the course of a long stretch of pages (over 90) and carry the reader. Lucky for non-book-buyers, Syngress posted ch 3 for free on their Web site. You'll get a great foundation on XSS, and learn about CSRF and backdooring Flash and Quicktime.
In terms of readability, ch 2 wasn't bad. I liked trying out various Firefox extensions and the author's examples were good. I think ch 1 should be completely dropped. It mentions terms not defined until ch 2. The language is exceptionally rough, indicating zero editing was done. The DNS pinning examples in ch 5 were confusing; it doesn't help novice readers to discuss [...] and then use [...]. (I think that's an error.) I really didn't get as much from the book past ch 3 as I did from ch 3.
The major take-away from XSS Attacks is that one should never trust clients. Furthermore, far too many vulnerable capabilities exist in applications most people would never dream of fearing, like those that render .pdf or .swf. I really liked the point that browsers constantly interpret and "fix" broken HTML, sometimes to the detriment of the security world. I also liked reading how users can be duped by attacks against the integrity of data, such as adding or removing details of Web sites.
Right now, if you want to learn more about recent XSS attacks in printed form, this book is your main option. Last year I favorably reviewed Lance James' book, Phishing Exposed, which includes some of these techniques. Later this year one of the other book reviewers, Dafydd Stuttard, should be publishing The Web Application Hackers Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws. Syngress claims to be publishing Web Application Vulnerabilities: Detect, Exploit, Prevent by Steven Palmer in the fall. Hacking Exposed Web 2.0 by Himanshu Dwivedi is another option, but I find his security books to be poorly written. I highly recommend visiting the authors' blogs, since they cover a lot of the information in XSS Attacks.

Click Here to see more reviews about: XSS Attacks: Cross Site Scripting Exploits and Defense

Cross Site Scripting Attacks starts by defining the terms and laying out the ground work. It assumes that the reader is familiar with basic web programming (HTML) and JavaScript. First it discusses the concepts, methodology, and technology that makes XSS a valid concern. It then moves into the various types of XSS attacks, how they are implemented, used, and abused. After XSS is thoroughly explored, the next part provides examples of XSS malware and demonstrates real cases where XSS is a dangerous risk that exposes internet users to remote access, sensitive data theft, and monetary losses. Finally, the book closes by examining the ways developers can avoid XSS vulnerabilities in their web applications, and how users can avoid becoming a victim. The audience is web developers, security practitioners, and managers.*XSS Vulnerabilities exist in 8 out of 10 Web sites*The authors of this book are the undisputed industry leading authorities*Contains independent, bleeding edge research, code listings and exploits that can not be found anywhere else

Click here for more information about XSS Attacks: Cross Site Scripting Exploits and Defense

Read More...

Spidering Hacks Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The `Hacks' series from O'Reilly seems to be breeding as fast as virii in a Windows network - every time you turn around another one. While the writing and editing have remained high some such as `eBay Hacks' have not really had great material. `Spidering Hacks' is an improvement almost back to the quality I remember in the last contribution from Calishain, `Google Hacks'.
She and Kevin Hemenway have taken a fairly complex topic, spidering and scraping web sites and reduced it to manageable chunks in their hundred hacks. The writing has the same light, readable feel you can quickly grow to expect from O'Reilly. Certainly I have never found myself faulting their editing.
There are some caveats. It seems that O'Reilly and Dornfest (the Editor of this book and the series) have fallen in love with having a hundred hacks and little in the way of an introduction. I think this may have been a better book if it was done as 90 `hacks' and had a much larger introduction as the first chapters hacks are all too light and more truly introductory material such as how a HTML page is built and how to properly register your spider. Given that only someone with a fair amount of web knowledge is going to consider spidering a website in the first place then this early material is way too slight. From Hack 9 on it quickly gets down to useful and informative chunks in each and no longer feels `lightweight'.
This may be a reflection on trying to extend the `Hacks' series into places it has to be forced. While the format worked well for Google and Amazon I felt the entire topic of eBay too light for a topic in this series and perhaps spidering is too heavy or complex. If this book had been written in a more traditional format some of my complaints would disappear.
All the examples are in Perl and the serious part of the book starts with examples using LWP::Simple to grab a page before going on to LWP::UserAgent and much more complex requests using authentication, custom headers and posting form data. It also covers using curl and wget.
Then it gets down to the nitty gritty of scraping using HTML:Treebuilder and HTML:TokeParser. This is all further expanded through the next few hacks until starting at Hack 39 through to 89 there are a good series of examples (perhaps a few too many). Finally there are two chapters on maintaining your collection and `Giving Back To The World' which tells how to make it easy to scrape your site and using RSS.
O'Reilly have a page for the book with ten example hacks, index, Table of Contents and errata and you can also visit hacks.oreilly.com for the same ten hacks with the possibility of more being added.
As a whole this volume seems a little thin. If you've been doing the maths then you've realised that only about thirty of the hundred hacks actually give any details on building and running a serious web spider. Sure, a number of the examples provide good information on how to perform various tasks and some of the last eleven hacks are good to know but in all the book feels like it lacks solid information throughout. A bit more information on various crawling and page parsing techniques would have been good.
After that criticism I'm now surprising myself, I'm going to recommend this book. This isn't a large field and when you consider that most other books on writing spiders and crawlers are less than practical and more than expensive "Spidering Hacks" has many good points. It's written for the practical Perl programmer, it examines several methods and gives lots of examples and while not cheap it's certainly inexpensive. Given that I found it both useful and inspiring the complaints above may be a little like nitpicking. I should also say that I found this volume immensely useful in writing my own spider and scraper (it gets a list of new books from the web sites of several publishers.) I have to be honest and admit that there are three publishers, O'Reilly, Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall, from whom I expect a decent standard and criticise a little harder when they move from that norm. If this book had come from SAMS or Wrox I may well have not looked quite so hard for flaws and been a little more generous in my treatment of the ones I found.
That said, I recommend this book to you if you want a practical introduction to building a web spider in Perl.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Spidering Hacks


The Internet, with its profusion of information, has made us hungry for ever more, ever better data. Out of necessity, many of us have become pretty adept with search engine queries, but there are times when even the most powerful search engines aren't enough. If you've ever wanted your data in a different form than it's presented, or wanted to collect data from several sites and see it side-by-side without the constraints of a browser, then Spidering Hacks is for you.

Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you.

Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable). Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to integrate the data into your own content.By the time you finish Spidering Hacks, you'll be able to:

Aggregate and associate data from disparate locations, then store and manipulate the data as you like
Gain a competitive edge in business by knowing when competitors' products are on sale, and comparing sales ranks and product placement on e-commerce sites
Integrate third-party data into your own applications or web sites
Make your own site easier to scrape and more usable to others
Keep up-to-date with your favorite comics strips, news stories, stock tips, and more without visiting the site every day
Like the other books in O'Reilly's popular Hacks series, Spidering Hacks brings you 100 industrial-strength tips and tools from the experts to help you master this technology.If you're interested in data retrieval of any type, this book provides a wealth of data for finding a wealth of data.

Click here for more information about Spidering Hacks

Read More...

VoIP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Internet Telephony Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I've been in telephony and networking for nearly 30 years. Started in R&D at a PBX manufacturer in 1979, then did a stretch with the, at that time, worlds largest Ethernet company. Then I worked on a Fiber Optic Voice and Data MAN (IEEE 802.6) and have been manufacturing telecom products for the past 14 years. I think that gives me the qualifications to critique this book even without having to mention the Ethernet board I designed for IBM was featured on the cover of PC Week Magazine in 1987.
This is a very good book. If you are a VoIP systems integrator or do anything with Asterisk, this book is a must have. There are major problems with the current state of the VoIP industry. The two biggest problems are security and the unavailability of a decent broadband connection with QoS and an SLA below $400 per MegaBit. Yes $400, but we're talking guaranteed availability and less than 0.5% packet loss,and 50mS or less latency with real penalties for not meeting the SLA.
Before reading this book I would not have considered putting an IP-PBX on an ADSL link. The author's idea of putting a Sangoma ADLS modem in the Linux box with PPPoE client software and controlling the modem queue is nothing short of genius. Then to top it off with the AstShape QoS scripts and the QoS monitoring tools, this book is an absolute bargain. With these tools I'll not only know if the ADSL connection is capable of supporting VoIP service, but I'll know exactly why. Much better than cutting over to the VoIP system and later discovering the problems. The whole book is just full of great ideas. There is something in this book for everybody from the Skype user to a single VoIP phone owner, Asterisk, or enterprise PBX administrators. Just check out the Table of Contents. Amazon does not have the Table of Contents available but it is on the O'Reilly website oreilly D0T C0M.
While the book is an asset for seasoned VoIP integrators, it is also a very good resource for someone completely unfamiliar with VoIP with a desire to learn. You can start out with free software for a Windows PC, progress to purchasing a single VoIP phone, then to a Linux PC. If you are leary of Linux, either get over it or you should probably stay out of VoIP altogether.

Click Here to see more reviews about: VoIP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Internet Telephony


Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is gaining a lot of attention these days, as more companies and individuals switch from standard telephone service to phone service via the Internet.The reason is simple: A single network to carry voice and data is easier to scale, maintain, and administer.As an added bonus, it's also cheaper, because VoIP is free of the endless government regulations and tariffs imposed upon phone companies.

VoIP is simply overflowing with hack potential, and VoIP Hacks is the practical guide from O'Reilly that presents these possibilities to you.It provides dozens of hands-on projects for building a VoIP network, showing you how to tweak and customize a multitude of exciting things to get the job done.Along the way, you'll also learn which standards and practices work best for your particular environment.Among the quick and clever solutions showcased in the book are those for:

gauging VoIP readiness on an enterprise network
using SIP, H.323, and other signaling specifications
providing low-layer security in a VoIP environment
employing IP hardphones, analog telephone adapters, and softPBX servers
dealing with and avoiding the most common VoIP deployment mistakes

In reality, VoIP Hacks contains only a small subset of VoIP knowledge-enough to serve as an introduction to the world of VoIP and teach you how to use it to save money, be more productive, or just impress your friends.If you love to tinker and optimize, this is the one technology, and the one book, you must investigate.

Click here for more information about VoIP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Internet Telephony

Read More...

Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)If you've ever been involved in a fantasy baseball league and gotten killed by people who seem to have time to do nothing but research obscure baseball players, Baseball Hacks is the book for you. In this book, Joseph Adler takes his love of baseball and combines it with an understanding of databases and data-mining technology to help fantasy-sports fanatics and baseball statistic junkies get their regular fix of the numbers that drive America's Game.
The great thing about this book is that the software used is all open source. Adler includes Access and Excel hacks for those who have Office at home or at work, but the main hacks in the book involve MySQL for database queries and R for graphic statistical analysis. I've used MySQL before, but R was new for me, and I really enjoyed using the program.
Adler also uses Perl. A lot of Perl. But he doesn't expect the reader to be Perl programmers; he shows how the program was written, and what everything does. More importantly, he includes the whole script so that it's a simple matter of copying, and making modifications if needed. He even shows how to modify the scripts.
Downloading a beginning stat database is as easy as 1-2-3. Hack 25 tells you how to spider websites for statistical data - including getting data from MLB.com. Detailed instructions on working with R are included in section 4 (hacks 31-39). Adler even includes formulas for calculating the more arcane statistics (at least to non-sports people like me) such as OPS (on-base plus slugging average) and ISO (isolated power - a measure of how well a player hits the ball).
It's obvious that Baseball Hacks is a book designed for fantasy sports fanatics. I've also pointed the book out to some computer applications teachers and statistics teachers - combining the study of stats and database construction with a subject that so many teenage boys enjoy studying is a great idea. Teaching database structure and analysis is tough, but give them something that they like to do, and they're all over it. This book does exactly that.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics


Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game.

So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handed pitching, for instance.

The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now.

Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball.The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis.It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results.

For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you.

Advance praise for Baseball Hacks:
"Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike."
-- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles

"The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st.In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates that the latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level."

-- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals

Click here for more information about Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics

Read More...

Google Apps Hacks Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)§
Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft can presume to compete with Google in the Web world. So much depends on search nowadays -- the Internet is one big store of valuable information. Yet I have to use an unsupported freeware utility to search my little Windows XP hard drive because the search feature that comes with the operating system is so slow and inflexible.
**Google Apps Hacks** introduced me to a Google universe that was even bigger than I had expected. I expected --and got-- lots of material on plugging into Google maps (lots of people are taking advantage of the possibilities here) and lots of tips on using GMail, gadgets, calendars and news feeds.
The biggest surprises for me were contained in the chapters on Google Docs. Part of the material was basic "how-to" and "did you know that..." information to help get acquainted with the features of Google word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. In fact, it appears that this book itself was collaboratively composed by Philipp Lenssen along with O'Reilly staff with Google Docs.
I was most impressed by how easy and flexible the spreadsheet application is to use. The author provides a pile of tricks and tips useful for both the ordinary user and the programmer.
This book should attract programmers (and other Web citizens) who want to investigate and test drive the latest cool things that many people are having fun with -- and a bunch more are making money from.
§

Click Here to see more reviews about: Google Apps Hacks


Can Google applications really become an alternative to the venerable Microsoft Office suite? Conventional wisdom may say no, but practical wisdom says otherwise. Right now, 100,000 small businesses are currently running trials of Google office applications. So are large corporations such as General Electric and Proctor & Gamble. Google Apps Hacks gets you in on the action with several ingenious ways to push Google's web, mobile, and desktop apps to the limit. The scores of clever hacks and workarounds in this book help you get more than the obvious out of a whole host of Google's web-based applications for word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint-style presentations, email, calendar, and more by giving you ways to exploit the suite's unique network functionality. You get plenty of ways to tinker with:

Google Documents -- Share and edit documents with others in real time, view them on the run with Google Docs mobile service, and use Google Notebook for web research
Google Spreadsheets -- Add real-time data to spreadsheets, and generate charts and tables you can embed in web pages
Google Presentations -- View them on a mobile phone and save them as video
Gmail -- Send email to and from a mobile phone, adjust Gmail's layout with a style sheet, and a lot more
iGoogle -- Create your own gadgets, program a screenscraper, add Flash games, and more
Google Calendar -- Add web content events, public calendars, and your Outlook Calendar to this application
Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google SketchUp: the new 3D modeling software tool
Picasa, YouTube, and Google Video -- discover new ways to customize and use these media management apps
In addition, Google Apps Hacks outlines ways you can create a simple web site with nothing but Google tools, including Page Creator, Blogger, Google Analytics, and content from other Google apps. This amazing collection just might convince you that Microsoft Office is not the last word in business applications. The price is certainly right.

Click here for more information about Google Apps Hacks

Read More...

Google Maps Hacks: Tips & Tools for Geographic Searching and Remixing Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed "info windows" just like in the maps section of Google. "Google Map Hacks" shows you how to use the power of the Google Maps API to perform useful tasks via your web pages. A key is required to use the API, and a single Google Maps API key is valid for a single directory on your web server, so the key you get will be good for all URLs in that particular directory. You must have a Google Account to get a Maps API key, and your API key will be connected to your Google Account.
The book starts out with a simple "Hello World" map application and moves on to show you how to map local weather conditions, find the best prices on a particular product, share pictures with your community, and add interactivity by causing a map to pan or zoom in response to user input. There are a total of 70 hacks that are actually map projects rather than just tips, which is often the case in other O'Reilly Hack books. I particularly liked the set of hacks in chapter 4, "On the Road". Since I live in the uber-congested Washington DC metro area, it is helpful to have hacks that tell me how to avoid traffic jams and how to find out "why my cell phone doesn't work there". Because using the Google Map API depends on inserting the correct code into the Javascript of web pages, the reader should already be familiar with HTML and with Javascript in order to get the most from this book. Amazon does not show the table of contents (list of Hacks) so I do that here:
Chapter 1. You Are Here: Introducing Google Maps
Hack 1. Get Around http://maps.google.com
Hack 2. Find Yourself (and Others) on Google Maps
Hack 3. Navigate the World in Your Web Browser
Hack 4. Get the Bird's-Eye View
Hack 5. Driven to a Better User Interface
Hack 6. Share Google Maps
Hack 7. Inside Google Maps URLs
Hack 8. Generate Links to Google Maps in a Spreadsheet
Hack 9. Use del.icio.us to Keep Up with Google Maps
Chapter 2. Introducing the Google Maps API
Hack 10. Add a Google Map to Your Web Site
Hack 11. Where Did the User Click?
Hack 12. How Far Is That? Go Beyond Driving Directions
Hack 13. Create a Route with a Click (or Two)
Hack 14. Create Custom Map Markers
Hack 15. Map a Slideshow of Your Travels
Hack 16. How Big Is the World?
Chapter 3. Mashing Up Google Maps
Hack 17. Map the News
Hack 18. Examine Patterns of Criminal Activity
Hack 19. Map Local Weather Conditions
Hack 20. Track Official Storm Reporting
Hack 21. Track the International Space Station
Hack 22. Witness the Effects of a Nuclear Explosion
Hack 23. Find a Place to Live
Hack 24. Search for Events by Location
Hack 25. Track Your UPS Packages
Hack 26. Follow Your Packets Across the Internet
Hack 27. Add Google Maps to Any Web Site
Hack 28. How Big Is That, Exactly?
Chapter 4. On the Road with Google Maps
Hack 29. Find the Best Gasoline Prices
Hack 30. Stay out of Traffic Jams
Hack 31. Navigate Public Transportation
Hack 32. Locate a Phone Number
Hack 33. Why Your Cell Phone Doesn't Work There
Hack 34. Publish Your Own Hiking Trail Maps
Hack 35. Load Driving Directions into Your GPS
Hack 36. Get Driving Directions for More Than Two Locations
Hack 37. View Your GPS Tracklogs in Google Maps
Hack 38. Map Your Wardriving Expeditions
Hack 39. Track Your Every Move with Google Earth
Hack 40. The Ghost in Google Ride Finder
Hack 41. How Google Maps Got Me Out of a Traffic Ticket
Chapter 5. Google Maps in Words and Pictures
Hack 42. Get More out of What You Read
Hack 43. Don't Believe Everything You Read on a Map
Hack 44. You Got Your A9 Local in My Google Maps!
Hack 45. Share Pictures with Your Community
Hack 46. Browse Photography by Shooting Location
Hack 47. Geotag Your Own Photos on Flickr
Hack 48. Tell Your Community's Story
Hack 49. Generate Geocoded RSS from Any Google Map
Hack 50. Geoblog with Google Maps in Thingster
Chapter 6. API Tips and Tricks
Hack 51. Make a Fullscreen Map the Right Way
Hack 52. Put a Map and HTML into Your Info Windows
Hack 53. Add Flash Applets to Your Google Maps
Hack 54. Add a Nicer Info Window to Your Map with TLabel
Hack 55. Put Photographs on Your Google Maps
Hack 56. Pin Your Own Maps to Google Maps with TPhoto
Hack 57. Do a Local Zoom with GxMagnifier
Hack 58. Find the Right Zoom Level
Hack 59. Show Lots of Stuff-Quickly
Hack 60. Make Things Happen When the Map Moves
Hack 61. Use the Right Developer's Key Automatically
Chapter 7. Extreme Google Maps Hacks
Hack 62. Find the Latitude and Longitude of a Street Address
Hack 63. Read and Write Markers from a MySQL Database
Hack 64. Build Custom Icons on the Fly
Hack 65. Add More Imagery with a WMS Interface
Hack 66. Add Your Own Custom Map
Hack 67. Serve Custom Map Imagery
Hack 68. Automatically Cut and Name Custom Map Tiles
Hack 69. Cluster Markers at High Zoom Levels
Hack 70. Other Cool Ways to Use Google Maps


Click Here to see more reviews about: Google Maps Hacks: Tips & Tools for Geographic Searching and Remixing


Want to find every pizza place within a 15-mile radius? Where the dog parks are in a new town? The most central meeting place for your class, club or group of friends? The cheapest gas stations on a day-to-day basis? The location of convicted sex offenders in an area to which you may be considering moving? The applications, serendipitous and serious, seem to be infinite, as developers find ever more creative ways to add to and customize the satellite images and underlying API of Google Maps.

Written by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, authors of the popular Mapping Hacks, Google Maps Hacks shares dozens of tricks for combining the capabilities of Google Maps with your own datasets. Such diverse information as apartment listings, crime reporting or flight routes can be integrated with Google's satellite imagery in creative ways, to yield new and useful applications.

The authors begin with a complete introduction to the "standard" features of Google Maps. The adventure continues with 60 useful and interesting mapping projects that demonstrate ways developers have added their own features to the maps. After that's given you ideas of your own, you learn to apply the techniques and tools to add your own data to customize and manipulate Google Maps. Even Google seems to be tacitly blessing what might be seen as unauthorized use, but maybe they just know a good thing when they see one.

With the tricks and techniques you'll learn from Google Maps Hacks, you'll be able to adapt Google's satellite map feature to create interactive maps for personal and commercial applications for businesses ranging from real estate to package delivery to home services, transportation and more. Includes a foreword by Google Mapstech leads, Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

Click here for more information about Google Maps Hacks: Tips & Tools for Geographic Searching and Remixing

Read More...

Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Few of today's web-savvy would contest Google's superiority among search engines. Behind the austere and simple interface lies a wealth of information just waiting to be tapped. Until now however, tapping all that information and power would likely require scanning dozens of websites hunting down tips for making the most out of Google. Fortunately, Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest and their colleagues have done most of the legwork for us in O'Reilly's Google Hacks.
Google Hacks is another in O'Reilly's Hacks series, "Industrial Strength Tips and Tools". In this case, 100 recipes for just about every imaginable use for Google. O'Reilly uses the term 'hack' in a positive way, meaning a clever technical feat or trick, as opposed to the negative connotation associated with those blackhats who break into computer systems for fun and for profit. Each "hack" is a stand-alone recipe demonstrating some aspect of using Google to find just what you're looking for. Most hacks also contain cross-references to other relevant hacks in the book, so you really don't have to read it from cover to cover. You could start with whatever interests you, and go from there.
The book is divided into several chapters, each of which contains several hacks. The first few chapters are targeted at the general end-user, describing in detail all of the various syntaxes you can use when searching with Google, as well as introducing the various topical collections (U.S. government, Linux, Mac, etc.), and other tools (Google Groups, Google News, etc.,) available. The authors are careful to point out where the various syntax pieces are incompatible, and which syntax features are available with which services. Also covered are various tools you can use to (legally) 'scrape' Google search results for further analysis. These chapters will be useful for just about anyone who uses Google. Some of the material (such as directly manipulating URLS to tweak search results and custom HTML forms) may be beyond the reach of some newbies. A general understanding of URLs, HTML and CGI scripting will be helpful in making use of most of the book.
The next few chapters are targeted more to developers and propeller-heads, describing the Google Web Service API, as well as providing dozens of scripts (mostly in Perl) for manipulating Google's index via its XML interface. Newbies and the casual user might find all this a bit overwhelming, but anyone with a Perl interpreter could potentially use these scripts to their advantage. One chapter also provides examples of using the API in various other languages including PHP, Java, Python, C#/.NET, and VB.NET. There are enough examples here of using the API in various fashions to get anyone with a sense of programming plenty of starting off points for whatever project they may imagine with Google's wealth of information.
The next to last chapter involves a handful of pranks, games, other oddities you can do with Google. Fool your friends with 0-result searches, let Google write poetry or a recipe for you. Draw pictures with Google Groups, or see just how good you are at Google-Whacking. This is the chapter for all of you who have way too much time on your hands ;-).
The last chapter in the book is targeted towards webmasters and offers several tips not only on getting your website well-placed in Google's search rankings, but also general help on getting traffic to your site in the first place. The authors also discuss strategies for using Google's AdWords system to the advantage of your business.
Overall, the book is very readable, and easy to move through (well, for a geek anyways). Each hack is self-contained, and can be read in a few minutes. Read it near your computer, as you'll likely be wanting to try some of these hacks out as you read them. As for its usefulness, I'm already using things I learned in the book on a regular basis to my daily advantage. However, if you're not more than a casual user of Google, all the scripts and API-speak might be overkill for your needs. The first few and last chapters probably justify the Amazon price for most users, however.
The book isn't perfect, though. I did find a few typographical errors scattered through the text, but they weren't prevalent enough to be too distracting. Also, with coverage of such a moving target as a major Internet property like Google, there will likely be links and even certain hacks that may not work, and features that change with time. Finally, the idea of narrowing down your search results to a manageable number surfaces often. In my opinion, what's important is not so much how many search results are found, but rather, whether or not Google can get me what I'm looking for within the first page or two of results, which it usually does, and which is why I use Google in the first place. The real value of the book shows itself on those occasions where Google doesn't necessarily get you where you want to be on the first shot.
In summary, true to its cover graphic, Google Hacks will provide you with a large number of tools to get the most out of Google, whether for serious research, casual browsing, procrastination activities, or just plain old fun.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information

Click here for more information about Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information

Read More...

1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)No, this isn't a malfunctioning keyboard, nor have I decided to join the ranks of kiddie hackers by starting to use "elite" language. It's the title of a new book by Sams... l337 h4xor handbook by tapeworm. For those of you not into "l337", that translates to "Elite Hacker Handbook". Having gotten *that* piece of information out of the way, I can get on to the review. And my review is that I really don't know what group this author is trying to target, and I think it fails regardless...
Content: fitting in; shortcuts; customize; browsing/e-mail; fundamentals; get the f@*! out of my chat room!; advanced automation; paranoia; networks; beyond windows; conclusion
I wanted to like this book based on the title. Sort of a gritty view of the hacker underworld, revealing "secrets" not commonly written of. What we get instead is a book that can't decide what it wants to be. People who are new to computers or confused by jargon (one of the targets from the back cover) won't see much useable info here. If you're new to computers, the whole "elite" form of typing and word creation will be lost on you, and you'll wonder what the (#@# this person is trying to tell you. If you already know enough to understand the type of style the author is trying to use, then you'll find most of the information far too basic. Desktop overviews? Running defragger? This isn't news, folks...
Parts of the book try to go into basic HTML coding and scripting languages. Again, if you don't know this stuff, this book isn't going to appeal to you in the first place. If the book appeals to you, you already know this stuff. "Advanced Automation" gets into more scripting, but again, not at a level which is going to advance the knowledge base of someone who already understands it. It seemed that with every chapter, the content was at odds with the style and tone of the book, thereby missing the target regardless of what side he chose...
The whole "l337" format really started to annoy me big time after the first chapter. I admit to not having much tolerance for that anyway. There were some cute phrases and humorous lines in places, but not enough to make me want to recommend it to anyone. I can't even recommend it as a parody of hacker culture, because I think the author is really trying to convey useful info. I just don't think the audience that would find it useful would read the book, and those who would read the book won't find it useful.

Click Here to see more reviews about: 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k


This is your ticket into the elusive underworld of the Internet, home to millions of elite computer hackers. 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k will show you how to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk of this exclusive community. Soon, you too will be able to go into a chat room and carry on conversations speaking the cryptic 1337 language. 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k will also review the nature of computer viruses, different practical jokes to play on your desktop and tips on how to live the hacker lifestyle. Join the elite society of computer hackers with 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k as your guide.

Click here for more information about 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k

Read More...

Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I found this book a "tough call" when I came to writing a review.
I have to admit to not being a big fan of a lot of the technology showcased this book (PostGIS aside). I have professional reasons for saying this that do not concern us in this review but should be admitted up front.
Firstly I want to be clear that we should thank Tyler because he has done a very good job in weaving a consistent and useful thread through all the technologies in the book.
However, I had to think about why he chose these particular technologies and why the book was laid out the way it is because it was not initially clear to me what relevance a lot of them had to the book's title - Web Mapping. To me the title implied a richer potential content wrt "web mapping" per se, so that when I opened the book I was surprised to see that quite a bit of it was really about GIS basics such that a title more like "Getting started with MapServer" or "MapServer for GIS Dummies" (not an O'Reilly title I grant) might have been more appropriate!
I also don't know if this book accurately targets its audience. If you expect a real treatise on the University of Minnesota's MapServer then this book will not fill all your needs. If you want to see a set of open source technologies put together in a logical and coherent way so that you can start on understanding Web Mapping from one view point only then this book is useful.
On to the book itself.
He has also highlighted some important features of some of the technologies in a way that good training courses often do. The lights definitely go on and you will hear yourself say: "Ahh, so that's what this does!". That is what this book did for me across a number of technologies: in particular the OGR and GDAL command line tools. (Thanks, Tyler, for this alone.) He also does what all good trainers should do: he clearly demonstrated software functionality via concrete examples. It is my view that, except for university, most people learn by doing and this book works well in supporting those who find manuals and technical documents opaque when trying to assess software usefulness.
I really wasn't sure if the technical detail with respect to things like command line actions for installing, compiling and installing some software was that useful: I admit to skim reading this stuff. Is this Web Mapping for the uninitiated gun programmer? Or is this something that less technical geospatial professionals whose only world is that of the mainstream "pay per license" software products (on Windows) would get excited over? Unless command line computing is coming back and becoming mainstream again (and I am of that vintage), most people today expect the initial heavy lifting decisions to have been done for them so they can start "value adding" immediately. I think all the configuration decision making that is involved with open source technologies is still a big put off: I know it is to me, and I have 20+ years in the IT/GIS industry!
I also thought that the technologies described in the book showed what I can only describe as a North American (perhaps even Canadian) bias in the choice of technologies. Look, this is a bit of a quibble because I really can understand a lot of the choices precisely because the main distribution of the tools in the book (except PostGIS) is via FWTools which contains OpenEV, GDAL, MapServer & PROJ.4: all core technologies to the book. Yet I really don't think it is all that obvious. (I had to double check when writing this review.) Even so, my view is that more coverage should have been given to other open source technologies rather than a particular group. So, for example, why not cover the really big database of the open source community: MySQL (not just PostGIS)? And this oversight is strange given that the book mentions OGR/GDAL support for Oracle Spatial and ArcSDE which are of little interest (in one sense) to the open source people and are not accessible unless the company you work for has them. Also, why doesn't the book give more airtime to the excellent GeoServer WFS (and WMS) than just MapServer's read-only WFS? Why not hightlight the actively developed European managed Deegree WMS/WFS? Sure, MapServer has both WMS/WFS capabilities so let's concentrate on one rather than confuse people with others (just reference them instead - yet Deegree doesn't even get a mention in the book).
But all this musing gets me back to the title. Is it really "Web Mapping Illustrated"? Not really. Perhaps it should have been called "Getting started with MapServer". Too long? "FWTools Illustrated". Certainly not eye catching in terms of elucidating interest from browsers of bookshops and Amazon.
All in all, a good book and very useful. It certainly helped me and because of it I have decided to use some of the supporting technologies in it in my day job. Well done Tyler.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits


With the help of the Internet and accompanying tools, creating and publishing online maps has become easier and rich with options. A city guide web site can use maps to show the location of restaurants, museums, and art venues. A business can post a map for reaching its offices. The state government can present a map showing average income by area.

Developers who want to publish maps on the web often discover that commercial tools cost too much and hunting down the free tools scattered across Internet can use up too much of your time and resources. Web Mapping Illustrated shows you how to create maps, even interactive maps, with free tools, including MapServer, OpenEV, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS.It also explains how to find, collect, understand, use, and share mapping data, both over the traditional Web and using OGC-standard services like WFS and WMS.

Mapping is a growing field that goes beyond collecting and analyzing GIS data. Web Mapping Illustrated shows how to combine free geographic data, GPS, and data management tools into one resource for your mapping information needs so you don't have to lose your way while searching for it.

Remember the fun you had exploring the world with maps? Experience the fun again with Web Mapping Illustrated. This book will take you on a direct route to creating valuable maps.

Click here for more information about Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits

Read More...

del.icio.us Mashups Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)For those of you who like to mash things, especially del.icio.us things - you must read this book! Not only is Brett O'Connor a del.icio.us expert, he can also string together a bunch of words like "API" "PHP/MySQL" and "aggregate" without sounding too geeky or scaring off those of us who are not smart so good on teh internets. w00t!

Click Here to see more reviews about: del.icio.us Mashups

del.icio.us offers millions of Web users an online social network in which to collect, organize, and share their favorite web resources. Using an underlayer of tools offered by del.icio.us, you now have the potential to tap into this social network in order to expand your own website to a whole new array of possibilities. This book will help you make the most of these possibilities and encourages you to use your own innovative ideas to create something useful, unique, and even fun.

Click here for more information about del.icio.us Mashups

Read More...

Big Book of Windows Hacks Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)§
Despite Microsoft's claims that their vaunted "focus groups" and client experience consultants have allowed them to offer us painless computing, you and the rest of the world know it isn't true. Waiting for Windows XP or Vista to boot up and shut down certainly are irritations in themselves worth a hack or two.
As you can imagine, this is a large book. That is not just the number of pages (650) but also the format -- of the fold-flat variety. This big book of hacks is easy to work with physically.
The editorial review on this page describes the contents well except that I would alter "contains more than 100 hacks" to "contains almost 200 hacks." Quite a difference.
The writing is clear and informed. I'm sure you have read many of Gralla's magazine contributions over the years. Be sure that the book is not all text. There are plenty of illustrations and even photos (for the hardware hacks) to guide you. The hacks themselves are directed at all versions of Windows, with the focus on XP and Vista.
Consider this book a compendium of all those tips you always rip out of your computer magazine subscriptions to save -- then lose track of. Here they are, all in one place, not easily lost given the size of this book!
§

Click Here to see more reviews about: Big Book of Windows Hacks


Bigger, better, and broader in scope, the Big Book of Windows Hacks gives you everything you need to get the most out of your Windows Vista or XP system, including its related applications and the hardware it runs on or connects to. Whether you want to tweak Vista's Aero interface, build customized sidebar gadgets and run them from a USB key, or hack the "unhackable" screensavers, you'll find quick and ingenious ways to bend these recalcitrant operating systems to your will.The Big Book of Windows Hacks focuses on Vista, the new bad boy on Microsoft's block, with hacks and workarounds that also work for Windows XP. You can read each hack in just a few minutes, saving countless hours of searching for the right answer. The step-by-step instructions let you apply the solutions in no time. This book takes you beyond the operating system with hacks for applications like Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, and hardware such as the Zune, your wireless router, and the PC itself. The Big Book of Windows Hacks includes:

Expanded tutorials, new background material, a series of "quick hacks", and informative sidebars
Security hacks, including protection at wireless hotspots, hacking Vista file permissions and user account protection, and more
Efficiency hacks, such as tweaking your PC hardware, troubleshooting hardware problems, and speeding up system performance
Fun hacks, like building a custom Media Center PC or turning a PC into a digital video recorder
"Beyond Windows" hacks for running Linux inside Vista, dual-booting Linux/Windows or XP/Vista, or emulate classic video games on your PC
In all, this remarkable book contains more than 100 hacks so that the power user in you never again needs to be at the mercy of systems and hardware run by Microsoft's omnipotent Vista and XP operating systems.

Click here for more information about Big Book of Windows Hacks

Read More...

Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 1 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)While Google is a researcher's friend, it is a hacker's dream. The subtitle of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers is "Explore the Dark Side of Googling". The dark side of Google is that far too many networks are insecure with inadequate security and enable unauthorized information to leak into Google. This leakage creates the situation where significant amounts of password files, confidential information, and configuration data and much more are easily available.
After reading Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching, the real power and potential danger of Google is easily understood. Author Johnny Long details how penetration testers can harvest information that has been crawled by Google. The need for Google to be an integral part of any penetration test is now easily understood.
In a similar manner, when Dan Farmer wrote SATAN in 1995, it was met with significant consternation in that many felt he was wrong to release such a powerful program into the wild. Silicon Graphics, his employer at the time, considered his conduct unprofessional and summarily fired him. Ironically, in 2005, a security administrator can be fired if they don't run a vulnerability scanner akin to SATAN. Running scanning tools is now part of security due diligence and any administrator not running such a tool is careless.
With that, some may think author Johnny Long gives far too much ammunition to those seeking to peruse corporate data, but those were the same mistaken objections to SATAN. The book is not meant to be a crutch for script kiddies, its aim is rather to show how Google can be used to uncover data that most companies would rather remain secured. It is simply a matter of time until such Google searches will be considered due diligence for any basic security endeavor.
The book's 12 chapters show how one can plunder and pillage corporate data via Google. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a basic introduction to Google searching, including building Google queries, URL and operator syntax, search reduction, and more.
Chapters 3 through 10 detail the internals of Google hacking. The avenues of attack are nearly endless and various methods are detailed from traversal techniques, site crawling, tracking down Web server logins, and much more. With the sheer amount of data produced on corporate Web sites, it is hard not to have information leakage. The problem is that Google is the perfect glue to bond those disparate pieces of data together to form a dangerous set of connected data. Google is now gluing isolated data, which is dangerous data when in the wrong hands.
Chapter 11 details what can be done to protect an organization from Google hackers. While author Johnny Long may be a hacker, he is quite mainstream when he writes that the best hardware and software configuration money can buy can't protect computing resources if an effective security policy is not in place. Long observes that a good security policy, when properly enforced, outlines the assets the organization is trying to protect, how the protection mechanisms are installed, the acceptable level of operational risk, and what do to in the event of a compromise or disaster.
Chapter 11 details the use of the robots.txt file, which can be used to block Web crawlers such as Google. The chapter also recommends the use of various tools to secure an internal Web site. Tools from Foundstone are detailed, in addition to Gooscan, a tool created by Long that enables bulk Google searches to determine how much information has leaked.
A decade ago, Google was the type of powerful search tool that was rumored to be used within the NSA. Today, petabytes of data are only a few clicks away on Google, and with the Google API, all of that information can be seamlessly integrated into a few scripts. The challenge companies face is to take security seriously and stop making it easy for their password files, payroll data, and other confidential information to be entered into Google's server farm.


Click Here to see more reviews about: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 1

Google, the most popular search engine worldwide, provides web surfers with an easy-to-use guide to the Internet, with web and image searches, language translation, and a range of features that make web navigation simple enough for even the novice user. What many users don't realize is that the deceptively simple components that make Google so easy to use are the same features that generously unlock security flaws for the malicious hacker. Vulnerabilities in website security can be discovered through Google hacking, techniques applied to the search engine by computer criminals, identity thieves, and even terrorists to uncover secure information. This book beats Google hackers to the punch, equipping web administrators with penetration testing applications to ensure their site is invulnerable to a hacker's search. Penetration Testing with Google Hacks explores the explosive growth of a technique known as "Google Hacking." When the modern security landscape includes such heady topics as "blind SQL injection" and "integer overflows," it's refreshing to see such a deceptively simple tool bent to achieve such amazing results; this is hacking in the purest sense of the word. Readers will learn how to torque Google to detect SQL injection points and login portals, execute port scans and CGI scans, fingerprint web servers, locate incredible information caches such as firewall and IDS logs, password databases, SQL dumps and much more - all without sending a single packet to the target! Borrowing the techniques pioneered by malicious "Google hackers," this talk aims to show security practitioners how to properly protect clients from this often overlooked and dangerous form of information leakage. *First book about Google targeting IT professionals and security leaks through web browsing. *Author Johnny Long, the authority on Google hacking, will be speaking about "Google Hacking" at the Black Hat 2004 Briefing. His presentation on penetrating security flaws with Google is expected to create a lot of buzz and exposure for the topic. *Johnny Long's Web site hosts the largest repository of Google security exposures and is the most popular destination for security professionals who want to learn about the dark side of Google.

Click here for more information about Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 1

Read More...