The 10 Best Cryptocurrencies

CRYPTOCURRENCIES

Crytocurrencies (CC)  / aka kriptocurrencies (kc)

Bitcoin (BTC)!  Etherium (ETH)! Litecoin (LTC)! Unless you've been living your life wearing  blinkers, or you've been hiding under a rock for the past year, I'm almost certain you've heard about them or perhaps any of the 1324 other Cryptocurrencies. So what's Crtyptocurrencies and what's all the hype about, you my ask. Well in a nutshell ..., Cryptocurrencies are the new money, and the hype is all about making money and lots of it. Many, many people have made small fortunes virtually overnight by investing in Bitcoin.

MAKING MONEY WITH BITCOIN

Let me give you an example. Bitcoin sold for less than half a $1.00 in 2010 and today a single Bitcoin is worth $14290.00 and fluctuating. By implication if you bought just $10 worth of Bitcoin in 2010 it would have metamorphosed into a six figure sum by 2017.  Impressive? Having said that, I need to add that there is no better time to invest in Bitcoin than right now, even though some billionaires are avoiding it, calling it a "bubble".  In my humble opinion they're avoiding cryto cash purely because they don't understand blockchain technology and the host of advantages it holds for future technologies.  

Bitcoin as a virtual currency, and is probably the only Crypto coin referred to most of the time by everyone when speaking about it, however, there are numerous other Cryptocurrencies available. Among them are, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA), Veritaseum (VERI), Decred (DCR), Dash (DASH), Zcash (ZEC), etc, to name just a few. But remember, not all cryptocurrencies are born equal. Some are more popular than others, some will create more interest than others. Some will increase in value faster than others.

The reality of the matter is that a quarter of a million retailers globally will be accepting this new type of money shortly because it's doubling  its value virtually every week. Bitcoin has captivated the money markets and the demand for other digital coins are currently surging as financial institutions are raising millions of dollars in minutes. This is a rare opportunity to amass a small fortune from these emerging cryptocurrencies by investing sooner rather than later.

Blockchain Technology

Cryptocurrencies are based on Blockchain Technology and again in my humble opinion will become the  core of many future technologies. Governments will benefit from Blockchain Technology when it ties GIS systems to their land ownership and titling system. When I worked in Madagascar on a Geospacial project for land identification, I witnessed that their records / paper trail for land ownership was antiquated and inadequate.  We found at least two cases where title deeds were forged, in order to steal land from their rightful owners. A blockchain-based solution would easily have solved this problem by allowing the land chain to be traced from owner to owner upto and including its genesis. A heathcare blockchain-based solution would solve  numerous patient health record problems, if  all doctors contribute to the blockchain. A patient's entire medical records from birth to current date would be on-hand and in a single volume, accessible from anywhere in the world.

There are so many other uses for Blockchain Technology and should never be considered a bubble. Cryptocurrencies are potential replacement currencies and the popularity behind them, is the fact that they are completely decentralized, and cannot be manipulated by government and other authorities like Federal Reserve bank. Crytocurrencies are safe and allows you to buy commodities on the international markets without paying forex and other expensive banking fees in the process. Cryptocurrency payments, permits  private transactions with total anonymity, is completely irreversible  and nearly impossible to forge or counterfeit. Hence Cryptocurrencies have been growing in popularity at a blistering speed so much so that it is starting to "challenge gold" as the investment of choice.

Bitcoin Mining

There are two ways of getting onto Cryptocurrency band wagon, the first is to open an account at a brokerage that invests in Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin or other Crytocurrencies. This entails parting with a sizable amount of cash and trusting them to make your investment grow. The  second is to mine one or more Crytocurrencies  yourself, using a computer capable of a high hash rate , alternatively using an ASIC miner for mining Bitcoin or an ASIC miner manufactured for a specific Cryptocurrency. This entails investing your cash into some pretty expensive hardware, that's going to consume and enormous amount of electricity. ASICs are coin specific and are difficult to resell  whereas as a GPU based miner is essentially a regular gaming computer with plural graphics cards capable of mining different coin subject to the software installed.

ASIC Miner for mining Bitcoin.

CPU's have a low hash rate whereas GPU's have extremely high hash rates, so the more GPU's you install and the faster they process capability, the higher your hash rate and the faster they mine. Both ASICs and GPU's are power hungry and the trick is to balance out your initial hardware investment and your continuous electricity and internet connectivity bills against your Cryptocurrency mining earnings. The successive blog installment will cast some light on how to setup a mining rig for Bitcoin, Etherium and Litecoin, etc.

GPU Miner for mining Etherium, Litecoin Dash, Zcash etc.

CC is an abbreviation for Crytocurrencies and sometimes  KC is used for  Kriptocurrencies. Most cryptocurrencies have a three character abbreviation much like AUD - for Australian Dollar, GBP - for the Great Britain Pound, EUR - for Euro, JPY - for Japanese Yen, etc have. Like I mentioned above, there are in excess of 1324 crytocurrencies and other crytocurrencies are constantly emerging with just a few of them listed below.

BTC - Bitcoin 
LTC - Litecoin
ETN - Electroneum
XRP  - Ripple 
ETH  - Ethereum  
BCH - Bitcoin Cash
ADA - Cardano  
ZEC  - Zcash  
XMR - Monero  
EOS  - EOS 
NEO - NEO 
BTG - Bitcoin Gold
ETC  - Ethereum Classic
TRX  - TRON
XVG - Verge
IOTA - MIOTA

However the 10 crtypocurrencies to look out for during 2018 are:- 
LTC - Litecoin
XRP  - Ripple 
XMR - Monero
ETH  - Ethereum
ADA - Cardano
Iota  MIOTA 
BCH  - Bitcoin Cash
NEO - NEO
ADA - Cardano
TRON - TRX

DISCLAIMER:
NB!  The author holds and invests in crypto assets. However, the contents of this post should not be misconstrued as investment advice;  it's merely shedding much needed light on some lesser known cryptocurrencies that have the potential to grow between 10 and 100 times it's ICO.

Quark Xpress Hack

Quark Xpress Hack

Computers are marvelous contraptions, they just make life so much simpler, especially in the business sphere. However using a computer doesn't come without risks. As you may all know by now, any form of electronically stored data can become corrupt or damaged at some time or the other. Hence the first rule of computing is "back-up". The second rule  of computing is "back-up" and the third rule of computing is "back-up". But how many of us got caught with our pants down in the data realm, having the intention to make a "back-up", only to experience file corruption  and loss of data moments before we actually do so.

Murphy's law dictates that the spreadsheet you spent weeks developing in readiness for a presentation is very likely to get corrupted the very day before the deadline, leaving you absolutely no time to redo it, but also leaving you with egg on your face. Sounds familiar? Sure it does! During my computing career I've experienced hard drive corruption, file corruption, disk corruption, flash drive corruption, compact flash corruption, SD card corruption, micro SD card corruption and even cell phone corruption.  

One morning catastrophe struck when a vital document (96 page full colour magazine) failed to save that needed to go to the printers the following day. Ardent Quark Xpress users can vouch for that or similar incidents. Many of them familiar are with "I/O error trying to read or write to disk [-36]".  Lucky for me, I've hacked a few files in my time and it's not to big a deal for me to fix it.

I've used Quark Xpress for many years on both Mac and PC. I started out with DTP in the days of Pagestream on the Amiga, Print Shop on DOS and PagePlus  and Microsoft Publisher on Windows. Ever since Quark Xpress Version 2,  I've encountered "ioErr"  and "I/O error" countless times. Sometimes this error disguises itself as "File is locked. Changes cannot be saved [-315]. This Project is locked".  Or Quark Xpress reports that the "file is locked with error code -54". Or "This Project is locked. Changes cannot be saved. [-314] "

These errors often occur when the file is transported on portable media from one designer to another, though it's not the actual cause of the errors. Most times it's caused by lack of permission, so its feasable to access the file's properties, select "Remove Properties and Personal Information" then click on the radio button that says "Create copy with all possible properties removed". Also remember that file size is always constant but the size on disk often varies. So when transporting files, try not to open them on the transporting media but rather copy it to hard drive then, open it. 
Files more often than not get damaged if you save a document to damaged media and Windows will normally ask to scan the media.

Just a few days ago, I defragmented my Windows laptop and thereafter I couldn't open a a very important Quark document that I've worked on for 5 months. There was absolutely no way in hell that I was going to redo this document let alone find the time to do so. Fortunately for me, I had a 50% complete, though non-current back-up file of said Quark document. I just had to hack it. 

So, I opened up my corrupt document and my 50% back-up document with a hex editor, because it was going to be a lot easier to stitch the document that to redo it.  I used HxD, it's a Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor with a very small footprint. As can be seen in the image above, the first two bits of the first byte of the corrupt file (CCTV-Project Documentation 2.qxp / underlined in green) contains FF FF at offset 00000000 and in it's ASCII column it contains ÿÿ as its first two characters. 

This is the instruction that Quark could not read or interpreted it as "I/O error trying to read or write to disk [-36]". I then copied the contents of offset 00000000 to 00000020 from the back-up document (CCTV Project Documentation.qxp  / underlined in green) and pasted it in the corrupt file and saved it with the write function and named it Salvaged CCTV-Project Documentation 2.qxp  (underlined in green). I then launched Quark Xress slected Salvaged CCTV-Project Documentation 2.qxp and presto the stitched file open revealing its valuable contents, saving me some 600 hours of time.

How To Fix QuarkXPress Error -36, I/O Errors - Quark: QuarkXPress,   QuarkXPress runtime errors,  QXPS Error code lists, File is locked. Changes cannot be saved (315), Learn how to fix Quark XPress documents, How To Fix Quark Xpress Bad File Format [-70]error, How To Fix Quark Xpress Unexpected end of file encountered [-39]error, How To Fix Quark Xpress Out of Memory [-108] error,

BROWSER HACKING

BROWSER HACKING

Hacking is an age old art of getting things without paying for it, or gaining access to places you are specifically denied entry. If you ever picked-up a round metal electrical box knockout plate that resembles a coin and deposited into a public telephone coin hopper or a toy / bubble-gum machine's coin hopper with the intention of making a free phone call or getting a few bubblegum balls or a toy for free, then you're guilty of hacking. If you've ever jumped over the fence at a soccer or rugby match or sneaked-in at a music festival undetected, to avoid paying the gate fee, then you are guilty of hacking. If you ever boarded a train without buying a ticket knowing full well that the station at which you intend to disembark doesn't have any ticket collectors, then you hacked the system. 

Hacking takes various forms and is not purely associated with computers. People hack their electricity boxes, in order to pay less for electricity. People hack their DSTV decoders to gain channels they are not paying for. People hack their public telephone cards to increase the available credit so that they can make more calls than the card initially allowed. People hack the MVG Casino cards to increase  the number of tier credits on the card, then simply redeem the card and collect the cash from the casino tellers.  In a nutshell you're a thief.  However, some consider getting away with such behavior as clever or mentally superior, by  outdoing/surpass/ outshine, others at their own game.  

With the following information you can easily gain access to other peoples computer data, not intended for publicly consumption. Skillful use of a few commands, could get root access to other peoples computers, access to their passwords, credit card data and other personal information. If it's your thing, you could steal the identities of careless or ignorant computer users. However, computers that are properly configured will deny you access.

WARNING & DISCLAIMER:-

This blog installment is published purely as an educational aid; and as a tool for those who wish to broaden their computer skills. I do not in anyway encourage hacking other peoples computers. I therefore cannot and will not be held  responsible for whatever  you do with this information.  Use it at your own risk. Its main objective is to point out security flaws and software vulnerabilities, so that you can properly secure your own websites on your  computer network. 

The tool we are going to use is the Google Chrome browser, though any browser would do. However these advanced commands may not work on other browsers. With it, Google makes it possible to find sources of personal information, confidential data, and info about web services as well as system vulnerabilities. The following is a list of alphabetical web browser commands that most people are totally unaware of.

GOOGLE COMMANDS

allintext:
allintitle:
allinurl: 
cache:

daterange:
inanchor:
intext:
intitle:
info:
inurl:
link: 
numrange: 
phonebook:
related:
site:

These commands have a special syntax including some Boolean operands (AND, OR, wildcards and quoted strings) like those listed below to hone your search results. Internet search engines can be divided into two groups,  those that perform  "subject index searches" and those that do, full-text searches.  For example Yahoo! is a searchable subject index engine whereas Google is a full-text search engine that employs "spiders" to index billions of web pages which can be search by  title or content.

+   (logical AND)
-  (logical NOT)
|  (logical OR)
* (wildcard for a single word)
.  (wildcard for a single character)
" " (text delimiters)

intext: - searches only body text of webpages and explicitly ignores link text, URLs, and titles. Eg. intext:food

allintext: - presents  documents containing the specified phrase in the text, but excludes the title, the link descriptions and the URL. Eg. allintext:money

allinurl:  - presents the search phrase only in the url and excludes body text and title. Eg. allinurl:peace

Caption of a root directory

This gives you an idea of how to the these search commands. So try any of the following by copying  and pasting in url bar, then search:-

phonebook:Audi Centre JHB
site:apple.com/robots.txt
info:donald trump
numrange: 115-135
microsoft cache:IIS 5
money | love
Hitler -Hess 
Index of +password.txt  
Index of /admin  
Index of /credit-card  
"Index of /root"  

inurl:server-info "Apache Server Information" 
intitle:"active webcam page"
intitle:phpMyAdmin "Welcome to phpMyAdmin"

intitle:index.of finances.xls

"three * pigs" - the asterisk will insert a missing word - (little)
"three * mice" - the asterisk will insert a missing word - (bind)
"donald * trump" - the asterisk will insert a missing word - (John)

Using a combination of the above commands, gives search results you never imagined possible.  Any web server with Index browsing enabled would allow anyone to  browse the web server parent directory like a local directory and have access to all its sub directories. Be Warned that deleting or changing files on other peoples computers constitutes a felony and is punishable by law.