Protect Your Sessions:
Secure Shell

By
Severed Dreams

Temple of Goth Link List

If you use telnet, read this. Telnet is broken. Yes, I'm sure it works just fine for you. Yes, I'm sure that it allows you to log into your remote host and do all sorts of things, like editing web pages, creating new files and deleting old files. The problem is that anyone between your computer and the computer that you're connecting to can monitor your session, and then log in as you and have just as much power as you have over your web sites. If this doesn't make your blood run cold, then consider the following example.

You sit down at your computer. You pull up a DOS prompt (or a shell window if you run Linux/Unix/os X, or your favorite telnet program for Windows or mac). You type in "telnet yourhost.com" and wait a moment while you wait for the other computer to respond to your attempt to open a connection by asking who you are. Now while you are waiting, all the technical things that the computers do while setting up the connection gets put into small fragments called packets. Now you can think of a packet as a tiny envelope that takes a small amount of information from your machine and sends it to the other machine. However, to get there, your machine hands it to another machine, which hands it another machine, and so on, until it gets to the destination machine. Then the same process gets reversed backwards.

So far so good. In fact, you're probably starting to get bored and impatient. So here's the deal. Packets are not envelopes. They're more like post cards. Your computer isn't handing a sealed envelope to someone trusted at the other computer and so on to the destination. Instead, you hand a post card to maybe your neighbor, who then maybe hands it to their wife, who then passes it around work, then maybe it finds it's way into the hands of a bum on the street corner, and then eventually probably makes it's way to it's destination. Now, to follow through with the metaphor, imagine your user id and password written on the back of that envelope. Anyone who happens to take a look in transit can impersonate you and the computer on the other end won't know the difference. Scared yet?

Fortunately, since mainstream information technology has known about this problem for years, most of the hard part about protecting yourself has already been taken care of. Generally the way to protect yourself is to encrypt your telnet sessions. The most common way of doing this is by using a program called secure shell or ssh. If your hosting provider doesn't support ssh, you might want to consider looking for a new provider.

If you're running Linux, you're in luck. You've probably already got it installed (the same may be true for Mac OS X, I don't know, give the following command a try). Simply type "ssh" and if a bunch of help information comes up, you're in luck.

Generally the syntax for command line ssh is: ssh -l [remote host] Then it will ask for your password: Then you are in. You're now for the most part protected and now you can just act as if you were in a normal telnet session.

In other words: ssh <- the program command name -l <- a switch saying that you're about to write your login name [user id] <- your login name for the remote server [remote host] <- the host name of your remote server, for example server.com Then it will prompt you for your password. [password] <- your password for the server.

If you're running another operating system, just do a google search (http://www.google.com) for ssh client (your operating system). You'll find some for the command line that uses the same syntax as above. You'll find graphical programs. You'll find free programs. You'll find programs that cost money. Take a look and play around with it. If you need further advice, send me some e-mail.

Severed Dreams

A Few Thoughts on Image Compression

By
Multispeed

EasyWebGirls.com

Many of you have told me that you had problems doing the last project. After rereading it I understand, my instructions were terrible. This is not your fault it was entirely mine. So let’s begin a project that is easy and will help you to get use to the tools in Photoshop! And Make some nice web effects that can be seen on VNWR.

First thing we should do is open Photoshop and create a new RGB image. Open Photoshop and look at the box at the bottom on the left. Notice the 2 boxes there? These set the foreground and background. Select the colors you would like to use by clicking them and choosing a color for each (remember the background will be the color the new image will have when you open the box).

Now go to the top and click the file button go to new and a size box will open. Set the size to 550x150 pixels. Make sure that it is pixels in both drop boxes. Click ok. Your new image just comes up with the background color you selected.

Next we add text to the image box. On the left of the image you will see the T in the tools bar. Click it and select your text in the drop down on the bar under the top options (this will be best if you select a bolder text type). If you look on the lower right of the page you will see the layer palette box and it will have 2 layers. The top one is selected. At this point if you need to you can center the text on the image box by clicking the move tool in the upper right of the tool bar.

Now press the CTRL key on the keyboard and click the text layer in the layer palette. This will highlight the text with bars flowing around the text.

Now create a new layer by going to the top of the page and clicking the Layer and then New. This will open a box and let you save as copy. Do so. Notice this opens another layer on the layer palette and it is selected.

Now click that layer and drag it down below the original text layer. Now go to Select at the top of the page and slide down to Modify then over to Expand. Click and choose the number of pixels to expand, try 3 to begin with. (You can play with this later if you do it again it will add to what you already expanded). However it is best to play with it on different pixels to see the effects.

Now go to the foreground and select a different color. This will mage the outline you are creating a different color. Try white on this to begin with so you can see the outline. (Unless you chose white as your background color then choose black).

Only 2 thing left, now on the keyboard press Alt and Backspace to fill your outline. Then press Ctrl and D to deselect the outline text and Viola the text now has an outline.

Now, this is what I would like for you to do. Do these steps again, only this time plan to make 2 different images. The first will be for the opening banner and the second one will be for a following banner. When this project is done you will have an animated banner that will rotate between the two gifs you just created so think before you do the two banners. If you look on VNWR at the pink text rotating banner you will see a larger version of this project. Also save both the banners and the psd files because next time we will add some glow effects just like that banner.

Take your time this will be a good project to learn the tools and their use.

Multi