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Security: Use Legit-Fake Emails to Sign-Up at Services (Using Google Apps)

Ever wondered if someone would be trying to break into your email? With that being said, if someone did they could look through your emails, discover what services you use, then go reset the passwords on said services – That’s bad. Even worse, they may already know what services you use, which makes it all the easier for them.

How?

First you’re going to need a Google Apps account. You can get one for free, for your domain. I’m not going to go into the details of setting it up and etc. However if you already have a domain, your domain registrar may make it easy to switch the domain’s mail server entries over. Like my registrar, NameCheap.(affiliate link)

Really, how?

Anywho, login to your Google Apps account (administrator mode), point at “Service Settings,” and hit “Email.”

After you’ve did that, look for “Catch all.”

This is what you’re going to point to your real email account, or a email account within your Google Apps. Mine happens to be @isnick.net. Save the changes and you’re finished. Now how to actually use it.

Using a Legit-Fake Email

Now that you’ve created a catch-all address. Where all email will go if an address doesn’t exist at your mail server, you can now point any username you want at services, and it’ll still go to the real email. The only down-side to this, you can’t reply from that email address, because it doesn’t exist, technically.

However, using a rather rigged method, you can induce a “legit-fake alias” by sending yourself a confirmation email to the same address via Gmail, then send out with the fake email. No one will know the difference, or know your real address. I don’t recommend doing this, as it’s way complicated.

To get even more detailed about this non-existent email sign-up trick.

Gmail Filters

You can then (if you’re still not convinced) send specific email from services to another domain completely. By using the filter inside of gmail to forward @amazon.com (for example), to example@yahoo.com, then delete it. Neat? Now not only are you using a decent fake email address, that actually receives (and if rigged) can send email, you can also keep all insanely-important (or paranoid) email completely out of it. Still no one knows your real address. (Unless of course they knew it before, or you gave it out to them).

In-closing, this is a rather crazy way of going about things. But if you really don’t want people to know your email address, but still be able to enjoy services around the Internet, this would be an easy way to do it.

Note: Even though this article is about using a catch-all address for forwarding email, some mail servers may tell a spammer / human if the address actually exists or not. For example, they could simply ask “does this address exist,” and the mail server will say yes or no. There are some mail servers setup to silently reject the email (if the inbox doesn’t exist), or will send back that the address is not valid. So use this carefully, and only if the mail server doesn’t reveal too much information about an address. A great insight can be found here.

Check out Google Apps.

Make Purchases with Your Cell Phone? (Ups/Downs)

Finally – A step towards possibly getting more for your money, out of your phone. Now if we can only find some way to do away with the restricted devices being sold by an unnamed company. I’ll give you a hint, beach ball.

No really, hopefully this will be a step towards increasing usability out of cell phones. More-so, make it easier to make payments. No more forgetting your cash, debit/credit card, and other information you may need to make purchases. One of the biggest issues I see with this is security.

As I was discussing with someone, security would be one confusing aspect of paying with a cell phone. Obviously Japan has it down, but can the techs in the US get it too? I encourage them to try, but I’m speaking about the same company that was snooping in Facebook’s business (direct link) while getting attacked from the other end – So much for paying attention to the local network. Not to mention the other company has a consistent history of playing irresponsibly.

That’s all.

If The World was Open Source

If only the world was open source so many things could be improved, with the help of many, many people.

First, I would start off with writing a chemical filtering system to filter out the bad chemicals that are released from factories into the sky.This is most equivalent to a packet filter.

I would then start off with deploying that application into many cities and countries so that each part would be able to adjust it to their needs. A useful GUI would be good for this. This is also where cloud computing comes into major play, literally.

So after that, I would begin working on nature tools. Example, a daemon that sat in the jungles world-wide and reported statistics to us so that we would know when an animal is going to drift away.. thus maybe being able to save them before it’s too late.

With that being said, this daemon would also report nasty spreading viruses, if at all possible.

I would then *try* to write an application that would scan the world for good places to dig up petrol. Lets face it, some places where oil companies decide to dig now is sometimes not good.

That doesn’t seem like much when you first read it but if you let it sink in it’ll become a lot.

I wrote this not to compare computers/software to humans only, I wrote it to compare what could really be done if people would help people to better the world.

Opinions on Copyright & Media Usage

For some time now I’ve been watching and reading the stories on copyright holders that have become upset at people who pirate their materials, and governments that have been taking privacy and piracy to a new level.

For the people you have been taking to court and sued for linking programs, distributing programs, etc, what crime is in that? If you ask me (which I don’t care if you do or not, this is my website I’ll say it regardless), I say that the people who help distribute programs are the ones who help the programs gain popularity. Especially for music artists.

Music artists and governments say they are losing money because people pirate their material? Are you kidding me? Half of P2Prs would’ve never heard of half the artists they have on their hard drives if it wasn’t provided free to begin with. Most of the people I know say that if they download something for free, and they like it, they will buy it to show their support – If they don’t like it, they trash it and don’t buy it.

With the governments wanting to take control of users activities on the Internet just goes to show that they didn’t use our money the right way to begin with (the first time) – So now they’re just pissed and taking people to court to gain what they thought they lost.

Music industries are also mad because they are facing having to live like the majority of people. Making less than $100,000 a year. Because they don’t make $5,000,000 and only make $3,000,000, they decide to take a few people to court and gain what money they have greed over.

Why don’t I ever see citizens taking the media holders to court? Why aren’t ISPs being sued for allowing P2Prs? Seriously, if The Pirate Bay is trying to be put in jail, why isn’t AOL, Comcast, Verizon, BT, Telstra, etc being taken to court? Why isn’t GM, Ford, etc not being taken to court for not making automated seat-belts that force themselves on the driver? Why isn’t Google being hassled & courted for indexing torrent sites? It’s the same damn thing!

I remember before this whole “Lets Kill the Pirates!” season, I used to see tons of people in the stores purchasing TV Shows, Music, Movies, etc. Now? Not so much as I used to. They raised the prices in some areas that I know of that drove some people away from buying at the store. I’m not surprised either.

Privacy

Oh, my opinions don’t stop there.

With the governments wanting to be able to record all communications with people/between people (like they probably haven’t already), that just makes me think:

What would they say if WE wanted access to their computer? What if we wanted to see who they were texting behind to their friends? Or what person they were viewing on a social networking website?

I’m sure you can guess.