howto check for safety of Shorten URLs before opening them in your browsers

Short URLs were in fashion a while back and now they are in requirement.
No matter which social, professional or public web portal you browse, you get to see short url.

But Short URLs from so many sources are not secure as a carefully planted short url redirecting (sometimes single redirection and sometimes multiple) to an infected web portal.
So, all the short links from non-reliable sources must be first traced back to original links and only visited if they cross-check successfully.

So, how to know the actual portal to be visited without using that URL and following it to final location.

[] from your shell
$ curl --head -L http://short.en/url | grep Location:
so, place the short url to be checked in place of "http://short.en/url" in the command provided above and then you can see the entire url trace and the final url to be visited...
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[] from the web-app
Link: http://webhoudini.appspot.com/

At this portal paste in the link in Short URL text box and click the 'Unshorten' button to see the actual redirected URL.

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How I got "2 Time Life-Time Banned" From Google Adsense

A Life-Time Ban from Google Adsense


I kin'of registered for Google Adsense service on my portal [ http://www.alwayspost.cjb.net/ (it's dead now, no more belongs to me) ] in very initial days, probably starting 2004.
I used to have few newbie blogs (not these, other newbie blogs) on blogger related to movies, wallpapers & technology.
So, in a very honest way I added the provided AdSense code to my blogs and started posting regularly. It was working at a sloooow rate but I was Ok with it.

I recently moved over from C++ to play with VB6 and was trying all fun stuff I could get my hands on.
One of the fun things I found was making mouse-clicks at desired locations.
& zooom~click~drag~code~drag~adjust~code... 
there was an ie-ocx-control in a form, loading all my blogs one-by-one and code (pre-loaded with specific locations of X-Y locations of Ads on the pages) forging mouse-left-clicks on all Ads... all repeated with a simple Timer.


Just left it on for a night... had LOADS of Ad Clicks and never tried it again.
One week later, there was a mail from AdSense in my GMail A/c stating I've been banned for life-time from Google's AdSense service.
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'Second Life' in Google AdSense

I signed-up for a new e-mail address and tried registering with a new mailing address, and there it was... my new AdSense account.
This time I did nothing against the rules.

Google released Page Creator (which is closed now) and I registered a new portal on my mailing-address at [ http://abhikumar163.googlepages.com ] and start linking it on forums with nice technological content to get valid page hits.


And, I made a mistake. I placed a link to my old-&-no-more-existing-portal [ http://www.alwayspost.cjb.net/ ] which was the portal registered with my earlier AdSense account.

Google's Crawler & Staff noticed it after I attained some amount in my account, and blocked my account and banned me for life-time Second time.
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Currently, I'm on my Second Life-time Ban... and don't wanna Third Play, may be when I get bored again.

XSSed Orkut after Twitter after Facebook <xss/>

'Are you social?'
ohhh... let me rephrase it 'Are you net-social?'
yeah... then how much socially secure are you when the plain-text attacks are htting millions.

2 months back with Facebook
now almost treated as synonym of Social Networking, and more than 400 million active users... Facebook was exposed to be vulnerable of a XSS vulnerability instead of proper implementation of HTTPOnly cookie protection as that doesn't count for XSS. The PoC video is being linked below along with article.
Article: http://www.acunetix.com/blog/news/cross-site-scripting-xss-facebook/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTddmr_JRYM&hl&fmt=22

Last Week with Twitter
the microblogging favorite of masses, and offering a newer promising UX... Twitter accidently resurfaced the XSS hole while site update procedure. Famous as 'onMouseOver' flaw simply injected the XSS code as tweet to execute the function on mouse hover event by victim
Article: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/all-about-onmouseover-incident.html

Previous Day with Orkut
previous day was a 'Good Saturday' (i.e. what 'Bom Sabado' means in Portugese) 'scrapping' off the privacy of Orkut Users. This attack is supposed to originate from Brazil and compromised enormous Orkut accounts in a span of few hours. The code with details can be viewed at the link below.
Article: http://antrix.net/posts/2007/orkut-xss/