Back to square one!

Had started blogging with Blogger a couple of years ago. Moved on to use WordPress, hosted my blog on my own site and now I am back to Blogger all over again!

I like WordPress but I am sort of forced to use Blogger all over again. My previous web setup was a complete mess. I had hosted my website www.banwarilalsharma.com with a Chennai-based web-hosting company called Silicon House. It was a budget-hosting, I understand. I accepted the fact that it was a bit slow and the servers were down more frequently than they should. Everything was going good until one fine day when I tried to open my site and came back an empty page saying 'Cannot Find Server'. I thought the server is done. Tried the next day, next week, next month (yes, I am this lazy!). The same result everytime. I got curious and tried logging in to the control panel. I was shocked to know that I have no hosting. It looked like that the bunch of fools had erased the server hard-drive or something. My MySQL database was gone, all the static pages were gone. It took me a couple of months of email discussions with them to know that nothing can be done. My blog is gone!

Thanks to Blogger, I had around 35 posts saved in the control panel (before switching to WordPress). I could recover rest of the posts through archive.org (thanks to you as well). I am back to Blogger once again, until I find a better solution provider and some time to experiment again. :-)

Web presence of engineering colleges of Bhopal

CarWale.com have started a campaign/contest for finding talent in automotive journalism world. It’s about writing an article on anything related to car. Winners will be offered job from CarWale.com and the best writer will get a prize worth 50,000 rupees. Here is the link to the contest.

I remember in my engineering days, I used to go to net-cafes and find technical conferences, paper-presentations. If I found a good conference, I made sure that I write a paper as per theme and always wished that my paper makes it. The enthusiasm was just irresistible.

Thought of passing this contest’s information to a few engineering colleges in Bhopal. Finding email addresses of my college i.e. OIST and LNCT was a few seconds’ job. But that’s all, I couldn’t find email address of any college. Found MANIT’s site but there was no email address mentioned. To my horror, RGPV UIT doesn’t seem to have any website!

The world is making Internet its home and the most technically advanced places in M.P. don’t have web presence at all. They don’t even have email addresses.

Anyways, came across a nice blog on MANIT.

AnswerTips: Double-click any word

Rajeev was reading the ‘Thai plane crash story’ on CBSNews a coupe of days ago and found something ‘cool’. He accidentally double-clicked somewhere and a small JavaScript pop-up opened up. The window had definition/meaning of the word Rajeev double-clicked. He showed me and I got interested immediately. It’s AnswerTips from Answers.com. I have installed it on this blog, test it by double-clicking anywhere on the page. If at all, you are interested, copy and paste the following JavaScript code anywhere on your page and your site is AnswerTips enabled too.

Alert!!! Renew And Secure Your Internet Banking Account Immediately

I was surprised when I received a mail from ICICI Bank (customercare@icicibank.com) with title Alert!!! Renew And Secure Your Internet Banking Account Immediately. The mailer had a ICICI Bank logo and the mail format was quite similar to what ICICI has. Below is the complete mail body:

---

Security Update for Online Users

Currently, you are on the ICICI Bank Company Mailer

The internet has become widely accepted for banking online. While we have taken all the possible measures to ensure security and confidentiality of our online banking systems, as we are providing you 128-SSL Secured Server which is highly protected to store your passwords.
Now we are updating our 128-SSL Secured Server to 256-Encrypted SSL Secured Server which is highly sophisticated server to maintain your personal information as our prior service to you.
Important: Due to concerns, for the safety and integrity of your online banking account we have issued this warning message.

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we were unable to verify your account information. It has come to our attention that your account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website .We demand that you take 5 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records to avoid running into any future problems with the online service. However, failure to update your records will result in your account suspension. Once you have updated your account records your internet banking service will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

If You Have ICICI Bank Personal Account , Click here https://verification.personal.icicibank.co.in/verify1.jsp

If You Have ICICI Bank Corporate Account , Click here https://verification.corporate.icicibank.co.in/verify2.jsp

Sincerely, ICICI Bank Security Department

---

I didn’t think much and clicked the ‘Personal Account’ link and landed on a page that was quite similar to what I see almost daily (oh yes, I use Internet banking too frequently). But when I was about to fill it, I noticed it is asking me for somewhat suspicious information like ATM pin and all. Then I had a look at URL. Hell! It was anything but ICICIBank.com!!! The URL was

http://www.iikii.com/bemarket/imgs/save/3/rbc3/www.icicibank.com/Login[1][1].jsp.html

Then I went back to mail-box, saw mail headers and found that mail has been sent by sd1967.sivit.org. So, I was about to become a victim of phishing! Trust me, it could have been a disaster. I remember well that a few months ago someone trapped me and took away my orkut password. He looted two of my communities which had over 4,000 members. Though it gave me a shock and I left orkut the same day but it gave me a lesson also and I am wary of such things now.

If any mail asks you your email, username, password, ATM pin, credit card information or any such thing, please make sure that you are not being trapped.