With all the new fangled torrent search engines available out there, it’s easy for new users to BitTorrent to get confused. After all, learning how the software works can be hard enough and then having to learn about its different search engines can be even more cumbersome.

Welcome to Speckly. The torrent search engine for the newbie BitTorrent user. The idea behind this search engine is to simplify the torrent experience over traditional torrent indexing sites. The home page is extremely bare-bones; just a search box and the site’s logo.

Using Speckly is as easy as it can get. The user types in a search term and is taken to a results page that looks just like a Google results page. Each result is categorized, has a list of seeders and leechers (displayed as full and partial sources), and the name of the indexing site. Speckly searches popular sites like MiniNova, isoHunt, Piratebay, LegitTorrents, SeedPeer, etc. It is also the only search engine I’ve seen so far that also searches Vuze. There are category links at the top of the page as well so you can click on the category which interests you.

continue reading "Simple Torrent Searching with Speckly"

While I do have Twitter, Facebook and several other accounts I barely use them and cannot see a real gain for using them extensively. Quite the opposite. Still, I was invited by Joe from Webby’s World to Kwippy which from first looks seems to be some sort of Twitter clone. It is currently in private beta and I would like to give everyone the opportunity to join the beta.

What you need to do is to follow me on Twitter so that I can invite you to Kwippy. Yes, that sounds pretty strange but from what I can tell the only real option to invite other users is to invite the Twitter followers. I’m also not sure if I can repeat that indefinitely or not.

So if you want an invite you need to follow me on Twitter. Use the following link to my profile. I’m not really sure about the differences between Twitter and Kwippy, if anyone is using both services feel free to post a comment to explain things.

continue reading "Kwippy Invites"

Coccinella is an interesting chat client that brings new features and lots of customization to the table. If you want to compete in the Instant Messenger market you either need backing of a major player or provide users with features that they cannot find elsewhere.

The client Coccinella takes the second path by adding new features like a whiteboard to the Instant Messenger. It can connect to any Jabber/XMPP messaging server (including MSN, ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk). But first the basics. The client has all the usual standard features like client lists, group chat, file transfers, avatars, emoticons and secure connections.

Besides that Coccinella supports Voice over IP connections and the previously mentioned whiteboard. Take a look at the screenshot below to get an understanding of how the chat whiteboard works.

continue reading "Coccinella Chat Client With Whiteboard"

If you are experiencing a bad sound quality in the voice over IP software skype you might want to try the following. This can be a quite complex problem but one thing that can really do the trick is to delete the file shared.xml which contains host cache information which is basically a list of Skype super-nodes and host pairs that are needed to run Skype properly.

It can happen that the information stored in the shared.xml file is not optimal for the connection which can have a direct impact on sound quality of the conversation. Imaging being routed over half the world to call a friend who is living two blocks away from your location.

Deleting the file shared.xml forces Skype to rebuild that list during the next startup. You need to close Skype first and then head over to the Documents and Settings \Username \Application Data \Skype folder in which the shared.xml file can be found.

continue reading "Improve Skype Sound Quality"

A new attack, dubbed Gifar by their creators named after the two file types that they mixed to create the attack (Gif and Jar), was mentioned in a Black Hat Sneak Preview article over at ZDnet. While not everything was revealed in that preview article it mentioned that the developers were able to combine two file types like the previously mentioned gif and jar files so that the first, container file type, would be shown normally in the browser but that the Java applet would be executed at the same time.

Many file and image hosts filter dangerous file types. If you tried to upload a Jar file to most of them you would get an error message stating that the file type was not supported. Many however fail to analyze the file itself and simply reject files based on their extension which opens the door for this attack.

That’s a pretty dangerous exploit. Imagine someone who uses this to upload a new avatar to popular websites like Facebook or Myspace (two examples, I have not checked if the two use advanced upload filters). He could do all sorts of things with the Java Applet once users open up his profile page.

continue reading "New Attack: Combine Files With Jar Scripts"