I have a new client who asked me to make 2 websites and no payment so far!
I have the ftp accounts, but he can always close my access and leave me without pay.
Can I upload the CSS to another server of mine and encrypt the link to CSS file?
If yes, can I restrict peoples to see the file if they find the URL to CSS file?
Thank you!
If they are his hosting accounts, then accessing them to tamper with the code for the purpose of disabling his sites without his authorisation is probably illegal.
If he hasn't paid you, you own the copyright. If he refuses to pay you, file a DMCA complaint with his hosting company.
Technological measures like this are futile and unprofessional. Next time use a contract.
This is simple. Same scenario happened to me, and what I did was added an new index.html which was an under-construction page, and renamed the original index.php as index_to_be.php.
I then added a redirection using htaccess to the new index.html.
The client contacted me straight away and paid up in no time.
If you don't know how to use htaccess, you can simply add a header location value to the top php page.
header("location:index.html");
The best way to do this is to create a simple PHP file that allows you to access, edit and delete files on the server. You can also search for a ready made lightweight ftp script. Place the PHP file somewhere on the server nested in other folders and name it something like temp.php. Now even if the client blocked you access to the server, you can still access, edit and delete files on the server by pointing your URL to temp.php. When you get paid, be kind enough to remove the file. Don't forget to password protect it.
In your PHP file you can use opendir() to read files from a directory, and unlink() to delete files. If all you want to do is be able to delete files, then the script will not take you more then a minute to create.
UPDATE
You can use the following lightweight ftp script that will let you view, edit delete files and also give you the option to password protect it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pafm/
You could remove the style sheet from the client's site, upload it to one of your servers and embed it from there:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://your.server/styles.css">
however, you will not be able to seriously obfuscate this. One idea that comes to mind is to add a huge number of spaces before the "link" tag to hide it in the source code view.
<link rel="stylesheet".....>
You could also lazy load it using jQuery, but that would disable the style sheet for users who have JavaScript turned off - mostly a no-go.
In the end, no matter what you do, all this will be trivially easy to circumvent. There is no way to reliably keep control over the site in the scenario you describe. Like #thirtydot says, the best thing to do is to send a screenshot instead.
This is probably like trying to kill a fly with a ICBM but...
You could always use a JavaScript to add the link element to the DOM, and run the JavaScript code through a JS obfusticator.
But still, that's hackish, and overkill, and ways you can get the link anyway.
Related
We are using FileZilla as out FTP. At the moment, I want to insert a script in the live index.html. Unfortunately, there is more than 1 index.html files on the ftp.
I was wondering how to pinpoint the exact one?
Is there a way to trace it back using just the Google Chrome Inspect Element?
Thank you in advance!
By "live", I presume you mean the one displayed when you visit a particular URL; and by multiple index.html files existing, you presumably mean that there are multiple folders on the FTP server, and you don't know which one maps to the URL in question.
The short answer is no: the mapping from URL to directory structure can be configured however the administrator of the server wants, and is completely invisible to web browsers, so there is no general rule to find out.
Barring luck in finding some clue, you have two ways to attack the problem:
Firstly, you can search for distinctive content: take a copy of all the folders you think might be relevant, then do a "find in files" for some text you know is in the target file but unlikely to be elsewhere. At worst, you might narrow down the list of possibilities before trying the next approach.
Secondly, you can use trial and error: make a list of candidate files, then edit each in turn to add an innocuous but visible piece of text. Then load the target URL and see if it changed; if not, revert the file and try the next.
How exactly does one do something like create a unique URL.
Like how facebook does it facebook.com/mynamehere
One way would be to create multiple folders each time we have a new user..but that doesn't seem to be the best approach
You can try a program like Elgg if you are trying to build a social media site. Otherwise, a person's profile can be custom in a couple of ways. Most of them mentioned. You, as mentioned, can use .htaccess for rewrites. You can use an automated custom url plugin (this may help: How to generate a custom URL from a html input?). Similarly, you can use the previously mentioned Elgg for social media, and but also as a last resort can use your folder method, but only if absolutely required.
I think the question is: how is it done technically, so we don't need to have physical file for every valid URL?
The answer is URL rewriting. In case of Apache server, you want to enable mod_rewrite and configure it to translate particular URL pattern (like myfbclone.com/mynamehere to myfbclone.com/index.php?username=mynamehere). This way you need to have one script file that handles all the URLs accordingly.
Different servers have different means of rewriting URLs, like Nginx or IIS, so the exact way of configuration depends on your server, but the concept is usually the same.
I was wondering how to keep images secure on my website. We have a site that requires login then then user can view thousands of different images all named after their ID in the database.
Even though you need to login to view the images the proper way...nothing is stopping a user from browsing through the images by typing <website-director>/image-folder/11232.jpg or something.
this is not the end of the world but definitely not ideal. I see that to stop this facebook just names the images something much more complicated + stores them in hashed folders.
Gmail does a very interesting thing, their image tags looks like this:
<img src=/mail/?attid=0.1&disp=emb&view=att&th=12d7d49120a940e5>
I thought the src attribute has to contain a reference to an image??...how does gmail get around this?
This is more for educational purposes at this point, as I think this gmail scheme might be overkill for our implementation.
Thanks for your feedback in advance,
Andrew
I thought the src attribute has to contain a reference to an image?
GMail is referencing an image. It's just being pulled dynamically, probably based off of that th=12d7d49120a940e5 string.
Try browsing to http://mail.google.com/mail/?attid=0.1&disp=emb&view=att&th=12d7d49120a940e5
Instead of it being a direct path to its location on the server's filesystem, it uses a dynamic script (the images may even be in a database, who knows).
Besides serving up an image dynamically from your webapp, it's also possible to use a webapp to dynamically authorize access to static resources that the webserver will serve -- commonly by putting the files somewhere that the webserver has access to, but not mapped to any public URI, and then using something like X-Sendfile (lighttpd, Apache with mod_sendfile, others), X-Accel-Redirect (nginx), X-Reproxy-File (Perlbal), etc. etc. Or with FastCGI you can configure an application in a FastCGI "authorizer" role rather than a content provider.
Any of these will let you check the image being authorized, and the user's session, and make whatever decision you need to, without tying up a proceses of your backend application for the entire time that the image is being sent to the client. It's not universally true, but usually a connection to the backend app represents a lot more resources being reserved than a connection to the webserver, so freeing them up ASAP is smart.
The code that runs after this GET request is issued:
/mail/?attid=0.1&disp=emb&view=att&th=12d7d49120a940e5
outputs an image to the browser. Something doesn't have to be named with a .jpg or .png or whatever ending to be considered an image by a browser. This is how captcha algorithms are able to serve up different images depending on a value in the id. For example, this link:
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/image?c=03AHJ_VusfT0XgPXYUae-4RQX2qJ98iyf_N-LjX3sAwm2tv1cxWGe8pkNqGghQKBbRjM9wQpI1lFM-gJnK0Q8G3Nirwkec-nY8Jqtl9rwEvVZ2EoPlwZrmjkHT7SM32cCE8PLYXWMpEOZr5Uo6cIXz1mWFsz5Qad1iwA
Serves up this image:
So the answer really is to just obfuscate your image names/links a bit like Facebook does so that people can't easily guess them.
I was wondering what's the best way to switch a website to a temporary "under costruction" page and switch it back to the new version.
For example, in a website, my customer decided to switch from Joomla to Drupal and I had to create a subfolder for the new CMS, and then move all the content to the root folder.
1) Moving all the content back to the root folder always create some problems with file permissions, links, etc...
2) Creating a rewrite rule in .htaccess or forward with php is not a solution because another url is shown including the top folder.
3) Many host services do not allow to change the root directory, so this is not an option since I don't have access to apache config file.
Thanks
Update: I can maybe forward only the domain (i.e. www.example.com) and leave the ip on the root folder (i.e. 123.24.214.22), so the access is finally different for me and other people? Can I do this in .htaccess file ?
One thing to consider is you don't want search engines to cache your under construction page - and you also don't want them to drop your homepage from the search index either (Hence just adding a "noindex" meta tag isn't the perfect solution).
A good way to deal with this is do a 302 redirect (temporarily moved) from your homepage to your under construction page - that way the search engine does not cache your homepage as an under construction page, does not index your under construction page (assuming it has a NOINDEX meta tag), and does not drop your homepage from the search index either.
One way would be the use of an include on your template page.
When you want the construction page to show, you set a redirect in the include to take all traffic to the construction page.
When you are done your remove the redirect.
What about hijacking your index.php file?
Something simple, along the lines of
<?php
if (SITE_OFFLINE)
include 'under_construction.html';
else
//normal content of your index page
?>
where you would naturally define SITE_OFFLINE in an appropriate place for your needs.
What I did when I used PHP for websites was to configure Apache to direct all requests to a front controller. You then would have full access to all requests no matter where they are pointing to. Then in your front controller (PHP file, static html file, etc.), you would do whatever you need to do there.
I believe you need to configure pathinfo in Apache and some other settings, it has been about 3 years since I have used that approach. But, this approach is also good for developing your own CMS or application so that you have full control over security.
You have to do something similar to this:
http://www.phpwact.org/pattern/front_controller
I am looking for more details, I know my configuration had more to it than that.
This is part of what I'm looking for too:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html
Enabling path_info passes path information to the script, so all requests now go through a single point of entry. Let me find my configuration, I know vaguely how this works, but I'm sure it looks like a lot of hand waving.
Also, keep in mind that because all requests are going through this single PHP file, you are responsible for serving images, JavaScript, CSS, etc. So, if a requests is coming in for /css/default.css, that will go through your php script (index.php, most likely), then you'll need to determine how to handle the request. Serving static files is trivial, but it is a little more work.
If you don't want to go that route, you could possibly do something with mod_rewrite so that it only looks for .html, .htm pages or however you have your site configured. For me, I don't do extensions, so that made my regex a little more difficult. I also wanted to secure access to all files. The path_info was the solution for me, but if you don't need that granularity, then writing a front controller might be a bit too much work.
Walter
In a basic HTML web page, how do you make the user have to enter a username and password before they are allowed to download a file?
What is the best way of achieving this on a website, preferably in plain HTML?
This can't be achieved in HTML.
With client side technologies, the best you are likely to be able to achieve is a JavaScript prompt that you use the data from to direct people to a secret URI.
This is something that really should be handled by the web server.
You won't be able to do this with plain HTML. Easiest way is probably to place the protected file in a directory protected by an .htaccess and .htpasswd file.
I agree with David...this can't really be done. Putting up a JavaScript prompt only protects you so far as well...that isn't really secure.
If you are on an Apache server, you could setup a .htaccess file and setup some user authorization options that point at a page which has the link to your download file. A simple implementation would give you 1 user/password combo that you could distribute to your users. The Apache documentation for this may be found here. Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with how IIS handles this sort of thing.
If you don't want to distribute a generic username/password combo to your users, you're pretty much going to be stuck creating a (or making use of an exsitng) user-management system. There are quite a few modules strewn throughout the web, and a simple Google search should bring you to quite a number of tutorials or existing implementations, depending on what you require.
first download phpmyadmin.open the file.click on create login.name it as login.php.then create a new want again name file.php.after you click yes it popout a logon information.enter the usrname you want and password you want
hope this help!