I’ve already mentioned the Asus WL500G premium wireless lan router in previous posts. Now I finally found some time to write about a few nice tips&tricks for the device: Reacting to button actions, turning the LED on/off by software, configuring VLANs on the different LAN interfaces, using an USB WLan stick with it and switching to a better web interface.
Opera recently released version 3.0 of their Opera Mini Browser for mobile devices. Playing around with it I decided to try to access a SquirrelMail webmail interface with it. It works great, but.. don’t try to use it with HTTP Basic Authentication.
I have a setup where the SquirrelMail interface is reachable via https and protected by HTTP Basic Auth. With Opera Mini one has to enter the Basic Auth user data every time one clicks on a link within the protected area. Solution: Add the userdata in the format of https://user:pass@host – this way you can even bookmark it. But then Opera Mini suddenly stops accepting the SquirrelMail cookie – rendering it completely useless, as one can’t even view a single message 🙁
Solution: No HTTP Basic Auth if you want OperaMini to work with (SquirrelMail-)Cookies. Without this type of additional authentication it works like a charm and the webmail interface is accessible while being on the road.
Opera Mini is a very cool browser and I do hope they’ll fix this issue in one of the next releases. Oh, did I mention MovaMail yet? (but that’s $$) 😉
Even though the technique is more than four years old and everyone should have some sort of firewall in place or the windows messenger service disabled automatically during the Windows XP SP2 installation the “net send” spam seems to be still around. Some examples of these spam popups can be found on this site. If you have issues with this kind of spam you should really consider updating your system, installing some kind of (personal) firewall or follow these instructions.
I was wondering about UDP packets to port 1026 and 1027 on my firewall so I started to log them with tcpdump – that way I discovered that these were still spam messages. Inspecting the dumps there were quite a few reoccuring IP addresses that tried to deliver their “net send” popup spam crap (see below).