Many novice users use the software that comes preinstalled with their purchased computer and rely on these to be safe from the dangers that lurk on every corner in the Internet. Trojans, Malware, Spyware, Phishing and worse are threats that every user should know about and be able to deal with. It is pretty easy to detail my security concept, it is not the most secure on earth but even those are not secure at all. If you want security do not connect to the Internet at all, that is my advise.

Let me explain my security concept and ask some questions about yours afterwards. The most important part in my security concept is my knowledge. I know what I should do and what I should not do on the Internet. I know how phishing emails look like, I know when I should be doubtful of files that I want to execute and I do know how to select passwords that can not be bruteforced in a short period of time.

continue reading "What is your Security Concept ?"

My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.

If you are looking for high rated TV shows like Lost, 24 or Prison Break you’ve come to the wrong place. I was fortunate enough to get a temporary invite for Zattoo which is live TV on your computer. This is a different and probably the better working method for now to stream TV content over the Internet. Zattoo is a European company which already has more than 300000 subscribers to their service and will soon become available in many European countries including Germany, Great Britain and France.

continue reading "Say Goodbye to Joost and Bablegum, here comes Zattoo"

Widescreen monitors become more and more common these days which run on native resolutions like 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Many applications, especially games do not support the native resolutions of widescreen monitors and it is also extremely difficulty to find wallpapers that do not need to be stretched. I did find a resource that has a compilation of wallpapers for widescreen monitors offering the resolutions mentioned above

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continue reading "Wallpapers for widescreen monitors"

Youtube Videos which are also used on sites like Myspace or embedded into blog posts sometimes take ages to load which results in freezes and stuttering which can only be solved by pausing the playback until the video is fully loaded. There is a possible way that would accelerate the download of the youtube video by up to five times. This is done by the free software Speedbit Video Accelerator which builds up five different connections to the video server to speed up the streaming of the video. This method does not help if you are already using the maximum bandwidth available of course.

Each request for a youtube video is routed through the Speedbit servers which open five new connections to the video server offering the video which results in a speed increase which can be remarkable.

The service has to be running in the system tray while watching youtube videos and starts automatically whenever a new video is requested from youtube. I was not able to take a look at some of the program features that are shown at the developers website but the video acceleration is working fine.

continue reading "Speed up Youtube Video Playback and Download"

Did you ever fell into the trap that you signed up for an supposedly unlimited service only to find out at a later time that the unlimited service did not really mean unlimited at all ? I fell into that trap with my first website which i hosted using an unlimited webhosting plan. No extra money for transfers over a certain amount of gigabytes, no worries about cpu and sql usage, everything was advertised as being unlimited. I started hosting some file mirros and ran some pretty resource demanding scripts and it did not took long until I was told to either upgrade my hosting account to a dedicated server or leave the company and look for hosting elsewhere.

This was basically the termination of my account with that provider and I decided to read the terms of service throughly from that time on. Today I read about Verizons Unlimited Data Plan which has a download limit of 5 Gigabytes and restrictions in place that forbid many internet activities such as downloading and streaming movies, p2p or web camera posts. So, the biggest question I’m asking myself now is what exactly is unlimited in the unlimited data plan from Verizon ? It is obviously not the data, so what is it ? What justifies the name ?

continue reading "When Unlimited means limited"