Category: Computers and Internet

Vodafone-Idea steals money from your account balance — Deducts money even on feature phones for Internet-enabled services

Cash-strapped telco steals from customers, as it struggles to repay loans, dues, and license fees.

I may have developed Android mobile apps but I do not use Android phones. All smartphones are spyware from the OS level. Android phones are the worst. Feature phones can also be tracked but they are less annoying. Or, so you think.

Recently, I switched on my Nokia phone to discover that the Vi (Vodafone-Idea) run by Aditya Birla had stolen Rs. 20 from my account balance. Just a few days earlier, I had added  Rs. 420 to it. This phone cannot access Internet but Birla employees decided to steal anyway. They sign up customers for some value-added service and pocket the money.

After reading online complaints, it seems that the company has been randomly deducting such amounts from several customers. I complained to their customer service rep and she says I had waited more than a day to complain and so they cannot reverse the charge. I told her that my feature phone does not have Internet access and she said her server is slow and cannot take a complaint. The company that claims to provide the fastest mobile Internet access has very slow servers internally!

As the company was going down, Birla quit the helm and let some ‘professional’ goat to be led to slaughter. It was saved by Modi govt in the nick of time. During the Manmohan Singh era, the CBI found 25 crore cash in a raid on Birla’s Hindalco office. Gold coins for 19 lakhs were also found. Crooked as Modi.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/coalgate-taken-aback-by-discovery-of-rs-25-crore-cash-says-hindalco/articleshow/24307113.cms

Say hello to Rumble and goodbye to Youtube

Tired of the censorship and the force-fed authoritative news sources? A new video platform has become refuge of conservative commentators. Maybe, it is a matter of time before the kleptocracy ruins another tech platform.

Bookmarks of Rumble channels

Several of my favorite youtubers like Mark Dice and Lauren Chen have started channels on Rumble.com. There is no need to subscribe to their channel RSS feeds on Youtube.

https://rumble.com/MarkDice

VSubhash.com is out and VSubhash.IN is in

I do not know if it is all a charade. I cannot believe what is true and what is not. Domain and hosting provider Net4 is supposedly became bankrupt. The NET4 owner had been arrested for nonpayment of tax and now is absconding. Their site continues to operate, particularly the billing section. Everything else is out. VSubhash.com is out.

I registered VSubhash.IN and uploaded my website content to a free host. I cannot trust anyone host now. Annoyances created by previous hosts had made me convert my site into a static site. My CMS, Subhash SQLSiteServer, is for such static sites. It saved the day! I was able to register the new site and upload the site content in one day.

http://www.VSubhash.IN is the new location for me online. It is an end of an era. For more than a decade, vsubhash.com had existed. Now, it does not even ping.

In the meanwhile, I had released more books

Something else that is strange. Around the same day as I uploaded my devil’s dictionary to Amazon, several other ebook publishers have done the same with undifferentiated Project Guttenberg repackages. I am sure my ebook will be lost in the search as more of such duplicates are certainly to follow.

ISRO Weather Satellite Image for Indian Cloud Cover and Rain Forecast

Images are delayed by one hour.

I wish ISRO officials went back to using Frontpage or Word to create their websites. Just when I thought I had a good bookmark for the cloud cover picture taken by our mighty weather satellites, they go ahead and drop a ton of Javascript junk on the site to create a few lightweight special effects.

Here is the code for a bookmarklet that hopefully will work for some time. Save this code in a text file with the extension “.html” or “.htm”. Then, open this HTML file in a browser and bookmark the displayed link. Now, when you click the bookmark, the latest weather picture will be displayed. After you create the bookmark, you do not need the HTML file. You can delete it.

<a href="javascript:(function() {
 
try {
  var dtNow = new Date();
  var iYear = dtNow.getUTCFullYear();
  var iMonth = dtNow.getUTCMonth();
  var iDay = dtNow.getUTCDate();
  var iMinute = dtNow.getUTCMinutes();
  var iHour = dtNow.getUTCHours();
  
  /*window.alert(iHour + ' ' + iMinute);*/
  
  if (iHour < 1) {
    --iDay;
    iHour = 23;
  } else {
    --iHour;
  }
  
  var TIME = (iHour > 9)?(iHour+'00'):('0'+iHour+'00');
 
  if (iMinute > 30) {
    TIME = (iHour > 9)?(iHour+'30'):('0'+iHour+'30');
  }
  
  /*window.alert(iDay + ' ' + TIME);*/
  
  var arMonths = [ 'JAN', 'FEB', 'MAR', 'APR', 'MAY', 'JUN', 'JUL', 'AUG', 'SEP', 'OCT','NOV','DEC' ];
  
  if (iDay < 10) {
    sUrl = 'https://mosdac.gov.in/look/3D_IMG/gallery/' + iYear + '/0' + iDay + arMonths[iMonth] + '/3DIMG_0' + iDay + arMonths[iMonth] + iYear + '_' + TIME + '_L1C_ASIA_MER_BIMG.jpg';
  } else {
    sUrl = 'https://mosdac.gov.in/look/3D_IMG/gallery/' + iYear + '/' + iDay + arMonths[iMonth] + '/3DIMG_' + iDay + arMonths[iMonth] + iYear + '_' + TIME + '_L1C_ASIA_MER_BIMG.jpg';
  }
 
  location.href = sUrl;

} catch (e) { window.alert('Bookmarklet error: ' + e); }
 
})()">ISRO Weather Satellite Picture</a>

Another reason to hate Google – Locking out email clients (Thunderbird, Seamonkey… even Outlook)

What the hell is a ‘less secure app’? POP and SMTP servers fail to accept username and password credentials.

If you have not been using your email client (desktop software or mobile app) for a while, then Gmail will automatically disable access to it. This is all right from a security standpoint.

When you get back to the client and try to access the mail after the hiatus, Google will send a “Security Alert” message to that email address, even though you are unable to access it.

When you login through the web interface, then you will see these ‘alert’ messages. In the message, it will ask you to verify that it was really you that accessed the inbox. Even if you answer positively identify that it was you and go through their stupid security checkup, email client access will still be blocked.

Google knows what the user wants but is trying to take advantage of their ignorance to shove them towards their proprietary apps or the gmail web interface.

The solution is to go to this URL and move their stupid slider to the ON position.

https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps

Restore POP and SMTP server email access to Outlook, Thunderbird and Seamonkey

Their POP and SMTP servers are secured by SSL so what is this ‘less secure’ label? FUD.

How to load a light version of Youtube? Welcome to YoutubeLite!

Also adds an RSS feed for the channel, direct link to videos page, and video/subtitle file downloads.

I installed Linux Mint with Mate desktop a few days ago. I hoped to move all my stuff to that the new OS but it has been delayed. I cannot use an OS unless it has been beefed up with my shell scripts, Nautilus Action Configuration scripts and my browser scripts. This is taking time.

So, I decided to switch back to my old obsolete OS and what do you know happened? The boot menu option failed to work. I then chrooted my old OS and reinstalled its boot menu. Now, that will not boot the new OS. I left it at that.

And, in my old browser, Youtube stopped its old-browser support and started loading slow heavy crappy pages with big text. My old Firefox browser is unable to load even one page!

Initially, I wrote a scrip to replace all Youtube links with Hooktube links. But their abilities are limited. So, I said “junk that” and wrote this new version of the Youtube Annoyance Remover. It is called Youtube Lite!. With it installed in the Greasemonkey add-on, I open videos in several tabs. The script waits for a while, lets the video load, mutes it, copies its video link, nukes the Youtube video player and then loads the link in a native video player of the browser. The old version used to remove the “Recommended for you” related videos but this one removes all related videos. If you want them, then open them in new tabs while the script is waiting. If you have good Internet speed, then the script may not wait at all.

YoutubeLite discards the custom video player that Youtube uses and loads the video in the native video player of the browser.

I could not load the video description in HTML. The links are not interactive. I will fix that soon.

Now, I can continue to download the videos using the DownThemAll extension. Because of persistent disturbances in the Internet and electrical connection and because of low speeds, I am unable to stream videos. I have to play them offline.

The GreaseMonkey code is available on GitHub. Use it with the GreaseMonkey Firefox add-on from the CA Archive.

If Youtube does not want to encourage these customizations, then they should do to Youtube video pages what they did to Youtube Studio pages that video uploaders have to use. That junk does not even load in my browser.

A big multinational tax-evading corporation should at least write their own Javascript code. Instead, these Google developers overload pages with hundreds of scripts from junk Javascript frameworks with their junk models-and-controllers junk! Only junk developers write this framework junk. Only junkier developers use it in their pages.

Please replace the word junk in the above paragraph with the street slang for crap.

BASH script to block Twitter followers, en masse

Without even looking at their names

In a previous update of EmailTweetor, I added the ability block/unblock, follow/unfollow and mute/unmute other Twitter accounts from the command-line (in Linux/Mac/Windows, not Android).

I do not follow anyone on Twitter and I do not want anyone following me. (I use Tweets for their temporary presence online, as a historical record. I delete all my tweets afterwords after I take a backup with TwitterToRSS.) When TwitterToRSS shows me that somebody is following me, I need to manually type their names to block them. Today, I created a Linux BASH script to automate the process of blocking them – en masse.

DDIR="/home/$USERNAME/sbin/EmailTweetor"
ETR="java -jar ./EmailTweetor.jar "
LISTFIL="followers.lst"


cd $DDIR
if [ -f "$LISTFIL" ]; then
  sTimeStamp=`date +%G-%m-%g-%I-%M-%S`
  mv $LISTFIL $LISTFIL.$sTimeStamp.bak
fi

$ETR trolls > $LISTFIL
#LISTFIL="test.txt" #Comment this

iLines=`wc -l $LISTFIL | awk '{ print $1 }'`

#echo $iLines

if [ $iLines -gt 4 ]; then
  let iCatch=iLines-4
  tail -$iCatch $LISTFIL > follower-accounts.lst
  cat follower-accounts.lst | while read sLine
  do
    #echo $sLine | awk '{ print $1 }'
    sAccount=`echo $sLine | awk '{ print $1 }'`
    $ETR block $sAccount >> $DDIR/blocked-twitter-followers.lst
  done
  echo "Finished blocking all followers"
else
  echo "No followers"
fi

The command java -jar EmailTweetor.jar trolls displays the owner account name, two blank lines, column headings, and two columns of follower accounts and account names. This script ignores the first four lines and the second column (containing the account names) and then proceeds to block the accounts in the first column.

How to block Twitter accounts suggestions

The simplest way to do this is to disable the HTML block containing these suggestions. (Right-click near the block, select Inspect element fro the context menu, find the ID or class names of the DIV elements, and mark them as “display: none!important” in the /home/$USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox/[your-profile-name]/chrome/user-Content.css.)

Another way is to manually block accounts that are repeatedly suggested. Twitter cannot suggest an account if you have blocked it. The coronavirus has given obscure bureaucrats some exposure.

How to block Twitter account suggestions

YouTube Annoyances Remover (GreaseMonkey JavaScript) 2020.01 update

Format labels are now included in the download links

Recently, I found that the thumbnails were not loading and the alternative download links were not getting listed. Both problems have been fixed in this update.

Youtube video download links and thumbnail fixed

About this User JS

Disables ads, turns off autoload/autoplay, adds RSS link, deletes “recommended for you” videos, unhides description, displays all comments, changes profile link to videos page; changes region to US, displays video thumbnail image, and adds a link to the lighter version on Hooktube if video is not playable for codec reasons. Supports Firefox-based browser up to Firefox 36. Newer versions should use a UserAgent (UA) spoofer add-on. YouTube loads a lighter version of the YouTube page for older browsers. This script will require the GreaseMonkey add-on to be executed by the Firefox browser. For embedded YouTube videos, use the script com.vsubhash.js.embedded-video-catcher.user.js.

The download links can then be sent to the DownThemAll add-on with the file renaming mask set to “*text*.mp4”.

EmailTweetor v2020.01.21 for Linux/Mac/Windows can list trolls (followers) and follow, unfollow, mute, unmute, block and unblock Twitter accounts

I will add a direct message option when the ones that I am following start following me.

I have written another book – a book of cartoons. I wanted the book to be privately reviewed by some American commentators and had to manually log into Twitter to follow them. ‘Following’ is the only way to send a direct message with the download link.

I also found that some accounts following my account. The only way to block an account is to visit that person’s timeline and then click on block option. I hate to look at these people. (I block everyone on Twitter and I do not follow anyone.)

So, I updated EmailTweetor with new options – trolls, follow, unfollow, block, unblock, mute, and unmute.

EmailTweetor.jar -jar trolls #list 1000 followers
EmailTweetor.jar -jar block HillaryClinton #blocks the mad cow
EmailTweetor.jar -jar unblock realJamesWoods #unblocks the jailed

http://www.vsubhash.com/subhash-email-tweetor-app-for-android.html

Bloomberg and New Yorker also protect their paywall with Javascript

Joins New York Times and BloombergQuint

Thanks to Modi’s slow Internet, I found yet another site taking forever to download. When the page finished downloading, the content of the article suddenly disappeared and paywall appeared. Now, Bloomberg is also confirmed to be using Javascript to protect its paywall.

A few months after I informed BloombergQuint, they implemented a real paywall with truncated content, instead of one protected by CSS. New York Times continues to be on Javascript security.

When you truncate content, search engines cannot find much value in the pages. These pages will not appear in the search results. CSS and Javascript paywalls continue to provide the content to search engines.

There is a simple alternative to all this. Like my website, use Javascript to lazy-load images, CSS, other Javascript files and content for sidebar, header and footer. Someone who disables Javascript will not see the images and miss out on formatting. Search engines will continue to index those pages.

Articles should be truncated and moved behind the paywall as they grow old. Their URLs should not be changed to retain whatever search engine mojo they have acquired. And, the meta tags for robots (in the HTML) should say “index,nofollow,nocache,noarchive”.

Update: I found that the New Yorker is also on Javascript security.