misc hacks

Get access to private facebook photos

Bad news folks... turns out any photo on facebook can be viewed by anyone regardless of how you set your privacy settings. On the post at http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/02/11/new-facebook-photo-hacks/, they describe how to gain access.

While every facebook user is at risk, you seem to really open yourself up if you send around links to your photos since that then makes the ID for the photo available to the world at large. It might be okay to send around the links in email. But never twitter, post on your blog, or put any other facebook photo links on any sort of public forum. If you do, anyone can get to your photo.

Get paid Android apps for free

This post http://strazzere.com/blog/?p=185 describes a hack you can do to get paid apps on the Android marketplace for free. The hack requires that your phone be rooted. But if yours is, it's pretty easy to get the apps for free.

Free Wall Street Journal access

The Wall Street Journal requires a subscription (and it's not cheap) to read the current days paper. While many articles are offered online in their entirety, if you are surfing for free you many times just get the first paragraph of the article... followed by a message to log in or by a subscription.

Well, turns out the Wall Street Journal has a bit of a hole in how they serve articles. When you get an article that requires a subscription to read, go up to the address bar in your browser and add the following to the front of the URL that is currently shown there:

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=

(um... ignore the fact that this is getting turned into a link)

So here's an example. You start out here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122179636955155969.html

And you only see the first paragraph. You go up to the address bar in your browser and copy in the stuff from above so that the URL you are going to is now:

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122179636955155969.html

And ta-da... you get the entire article.

I don't know how long this hack will last. Seems like they'll close this hole at some point. But in the mean time you can read any article on the Wall Street Journal site for free!