I never really understood why it was this difficulty to identify the people benefiting from running a botnet. I mean, while it is relatively easy to use chained proxies, middleman and other means to stay anonymous, it is not as easy to anonymize the flow of money. Eventually, the money will land at the people [...]

Google recently rolled out a design change to their search interface. The navigation at the top linking to several Google properties, a user’s Google account and other Google services has a new black background and grey font colors. This new design change has been rolled out to google.com and all country specific Google domains. You [...]

Ever since the days of DOS, every directory has a special folder in it named “nul”. You can use this to create a folder that will sync in Linux but not in Windows. This is because the folder can exist on Linux but not on Windows. The Nul Folder The nul folder is designed to [...]

It can seem to us that the internet is a limitless place, and in many ways it is. Organizations can always expand their servers to accommodate more traffic, or more content, of whatever it is that they feel they need more of. With space on Facebook, huge swaths of free room in email accounts and [...]

The National Association of the Deaf has sued Netflix, the movie rental company that offers it’s videos via the mail and by online instant access. The NAD is suing them for failure to offer subtitles on enough of its streaming content. The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in U.S District Court of Massachusetts. The NAD [...]

As a webmaster, you have to make sure that your websites are loading as fast as possible, without sacrificing functionality. While it may be cool to have ten 500 Kilobyte images on your homepage, it may in turn lead to visitors leaving the site before it is completely loaded in their browsers. Lower page loading [...]

In a major shakeup for the Internet, the global Internet governing body ICANN has voted to allow any word or name to be used as an Internet suffix. Currently the number of suffixes, commonly known as TLDs (Top Level Domain) sits at 22 and includes ‘.co.’ country variations that bring the total up to 250, [...]

We have reviewed both the free and professional version of the popular malware remover SUPERAntiSpyware here at Ghacks. Many users find the free version sufficient for all related tasks, while fewer find it necessary to upgrade to the professional version for extra features such as threat realtime blocking or daily definition updates. Most have used [...]

Uploading your property onto the internet can be scary. Intellectual property can be just as, if not more, valuable than the cars we drive and homes we live in, yet we often treat it as if it’s nothing of value – as if we have no vested interest in protecting it. When we post photos [...]

News out of Washington is that Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, said he is optimistic that Congress would update the 1986 law (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA) to protect the privacy of Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones. The law was originally crafted during the era of [...]

When you look at the top five web browsers on today’s Internet, which are undoubtedly Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari you will notice that all but one reduce their functionality to Internet browsing. Opera is the only browser of the five that offers an integrated email client. The idea behind SeaMonkey is [...]

In May of 2009 a Sanford, Maine based company, Patco Construction Co, filed suit against Ocean Bank, a division of Bridgeport, Conn. Based People’s United Bank. Patco used online banking to make weekly payroll payments and claimed that cyber thieves had used a Trojan (ZeuS) to steal Patco’s online credential and then heisted $588,000 over [...]

The largest test yet of the Internet’s new IPv6 addressing system is taking place worldwide today.  Companies including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook are switching on IPv6 versions of their websites for a one day trial. The current Internet addressing system, IPv4 has almost run out of addresses as its designers never anticipated the explosion [...]

Right now, most of the world is using IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). The problem is that it does not allow for enough addresses. The world is just too big of a place. Enter IPv6. It provides vastly more addresses (2^128) and is the future of the web. Most users will not notice a difference, [...]

Nope, this isn’t a fake story from the cover of the National Enquirer, it’s a real story about how Chinese teenager Xiao Zheng, has sold one of his kidneys through a broker for the Yuan 20,000 needed to buy an iPhone and an iPad 2. The report on Yahoo! News says that the teenager, who lives [...]

In the final part of this article series I want to look at what the future might hold for the Internet and all of us who use it. So far I’ve discussed how secretive governments view the Internet in Part 1, Asked if the west wants to constrain it in Part 2 and then into [...]

In the first two parts of this article series I’ve written about how Iran is reportedly planning to build their own in-country Internet and asked if western countries want to constrain the Internet. In this part I want to look at how criminals and terrorists use the Internet, and how nations are now using it [...]

Yesterday I wrote and article about how Iran apparently wants to create its own in-country Internet. This move is almost unprecedented with only North Korea having done this before. In the article I discussed the situation with Internet access in these two countries and also in China, which has a reasonable open policy for web [...]

The Internet is a fascinating place, especially when countries that don’t embrace the concepts of freedom of expression and freedom of speech are involved. Each of these countries takes it’s own view of what the Internet should be, and they usually follow political conventions in those countries. This could be set to change however. Iran [...]

When the website data or web applications are added to your cloud based servers it becomes essential to set up remote connection with the virtual servers in the cloud. Connecting to a cloud enables you to transfer data from the local network of the organization or desktop to the “virtual world” of the cloud server. [...]

The popular cloud hosting and syncing service Dropbox has been in the news lately. First there were reports about Dropbox being insecure because of a configuration file that could allow anyone to access a user’s Dropbox storage. Then there were news that photo galleries might be accessible on the Internet without the user’s knowledge. If [...]

Recent stats from the Sandvines Global internet Phenomenon report show that Netflix accounts for more web traffic in North America than bit torrents. While this is a good thing for Hollywood, it might backfire due to the ISPS recent trend to cap bandwidth in order to stop piracy. The report shows that Netflix accounts for [...]

Last week a bill was tabled in the American senate that would allow the Department of Justice to take out a court order against sites accused of infringing copyright. Google’s Erik Schmidt came out strongly against the bill in London on the 18th. Is this an attempt on Google to do no evil, or is [...]

Didn’t I write recently on Facebook’s general lack of privacy, intentional or otherwise? How ironic is it then that Facebook chose to attack Google on its general disrespect for personal data privacy? This would have been bad enough, but the way that Facebook chose for its attack turns the story from just plain ridiculous to [...]

Everyone knows the risks of working on an open Wi-Fi connection. Everything can be stolen from your security to your bandwidth. But the courts in the US have been historically unaware of the implications of an open Wi Fi connection. Finally, though, there appears to be one judge that understands that an IP connection does [...]

This week saw the acquisition of TweetDeck by Twitter for $40-$50 million. Yay for Twitter, right? They’ve gotten access to a popular and functional client. But why TweetDeck, and why now? Well, that’s quite a story. With the acquisition of TweetDeck, Twitter is getting hold of a popular Twitter client. It’s got versions for the [...]

The way we consume media has changed drastically over the last few years. Instead of watching the nightly news, we are getting news real-time. And the news we get is no longer filtered by big media companies. We’re just as likely to get the news from a person who sees it happen as we are [...]

You know that I’m using LastPass as my password manager. It offers everything that I need and then some. One thing that I like about the service is that the company is dedicated and taking security seriously. A blog post at the LastPass blog entitled LastPass Security Notifications mentions that the company has noticed a [...]

1000 days of retention, wow, that is a lot. That is almost three years full of data retention. I remember that my first Usenet provider stored data for a few days after which they were deleted. Not enough time to go on holiday for two weeks and to come back to continue where you left [...]

Many digital cameras store the camera’s serial number in the photo’s EXIF information, which can then be used to identify photos taken with that specific camera. The new web service Stolen Camera Finder uses this concept to locate photos on the Internet. You can upload a photo taken with a particular camera to the service’s [...]

Here is a task for you. Go to Google, Bing or your preferred search engine, and enter the following search term into the search box at the top: site:http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/ What’s the result? Right, 25k of unprotected Dropbox photo galleries. You can click on any of the links to see the contents of the selected gallery [...]

The Internet is full of possibilities to download free music legally. Free and legal, is not that tautological? Not necessarily, as you may stumble upon offers to download free music that are only free for users from a specific country. This guide however covers methods and services that allow or enable everyone to download free [...]

Several events recently have shown some of the weaknesses, or dangers, of cloud based hosting, and the need for information and guides to aid users in protecting their data in the cloud. To keep it simple: The cloud in the context of this article refers to all remote storage locations that you do not have [...]

Hacking into an e-mail, Facebook, or other account is often a crime of opportunity. That is not to say talented individuals with advanced knowledge are not a threat, but it can be easier than you think to expose your password. For those that have had their account compromised in the past, one of these methods [...]

Office 365, Microsoft’s attempt to bring Office to the web as a subscription based service, has been available since 2010 for a select number of beta testers. Back then you were able to enter your email address to receive a notification once the service would enter public beta. That day has come and users from [...]

Before Youtube, Google tried to conquer the video hosting niche with a service that they called Google Video. When they discovered that they could not compete with Youtube, they bought that service and made people forget all about Google Video. There are actually many similarities to Google’s attempt in past years to get a foothold [...]

The article Dropbox authentication: insecure by design by Derek Newton got quite the press in the past week or so. So what exactly did he find out to come to this conclusion? Dropbox creates a config.db file in the main application data folder, a SQLite database file that can be edited with programs that can [...]

I sometimes cannot believe the decisions that major Internet companies make. The latest company to join the ranks is AOL with the decision to close down the Download Squad technology blog. Download Squad was one of the two blogs that I followed closely ever since I started running my own tech news site, the other [...]

It’s been on the cards for a couple of years now but today YouTube has launched its new Live service.  New live streaming video can be found at www.youtube.com/live and they follow several tests that included high-profile concerts and events. This now puts YouTube, which already gets around 2 billion video views every day, up against [...]

The developers of the popular WordPress blogging script have just released an update that raises the version of WordPress to 3.1.1. WordPress 3.1.1 is a security update which means that it is a mandatory update for all webmasters who run public self-hosted WordPress blogs. The blog post that announced the new version of WordPress mentioned [...]

Would not it be great if you could get a two paragraph summary about Shakespear’s Hamlet instead of having to read the whole book? The answer is no of course, but bare with me for a moment. Sometimes you do not have enough time to read all of a text document. Maybe you have a [...]

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive service has made the news recently. The service allows you to store any kind of file, and even stream music loaded to it through its Cloud Player. It would be wonderful to have such a service, but at what cost? I don’t mean the price, which is free, but the conditions. [...]

It’s been over a decade now that we’ve had secure socket layer (SSL) encryption technology for making Internet transactions safe. With only a very few exceptions, including a certificate cloning scare a couple of years ago, it’s worked very well and has enabled millions of people online to perform trillions of online purchases and financial [...]

If you have ever had your browser and your computer hijacked, it can be one of the most unpleasant experiences. This sort of problem will take a lot of hours for you to clean up, and if it’s really bad, it can take days, and sometimes a loss of precious money and unrecoverable data. As [...]

A few years ago, the social networking site Twitter was virtually unheard of. However, it then started becoming very popular with the rich and famous, prompting a massive surge in users from the general population. Or was it the other way round? What is it that makes this website so popular with the majority of [...]

5 Useful Internet Tools looks at web applications that Internet users may find useful. These tools aid you in various tasks, from storing information to specific web searches and reminding you that your Internet time for the day is up. The usefulness of the tools depends largely on how you are using the Internet. If [...]

 Business social networking website LinkedIn has sent emails to everyone of their first one million members, including myself, to thank them for being an “early adopter” and “help[ing] lead the way” with the adoption of new technologies. In a clever marketing campaign they’re even telling people what member number they were, in my case number [...]

You may have heard that the New York Times will introduce its “paywall” on March 28. It basically limits visitors to 20 articles per month, after which a paywall message appears that asks them to sign up to become a subscriber to access the contents on the site. The message appears as an overlay on [...]

I love Giganews. The Usenet provider never let me down since I started using their service exclusively years ago. Sure, their pricing is a tad higher than that of other Usenet providers, but I think that it is well deserved. Especially the Diamond account is in my opinion still a bargain considering that you not [...]

We have talked about the dangers of publicly available location information before (see Creepy! Track Michael Arrington, Or Anyone Else, Via Geolocation for pointers). A simply example would be a Tweet from your holiday location, which could invite burglars or social engineering attacks. But there is more to it than the direct danger, people can [...]