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 search the internet for tips to improve your download speeds with bittorrent clients such as Azureus and uTorrent you do find many tips that have one thing in common, all suggest different settings for maximum performance. There are several things that can influence download speeds in bittorrent including bad Seeds to Peer ratio and firewall settings. I would only change settings in my bittorrent client if I thought that my download speeds would be really bad, say 2K with a torrent that has 10+ seeders.
David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc revealed at the Open Data 2007 conference that (some) ISPs are selling so called clickstream data of their users to marketing companies like Compete Inc. Clickstream data refers to the sequence of websites visited including the time that the sites were viewed. This is however not all the information that the companies receive. They surely analyze the user base of the ISPs that are selling the clickstream data which can be used to create complex marketing strategies for certain states or even regions in the United States.
The guy who is running One Tip a day posted a monster list of free tv sites and softwares that make it possible and easy to watch even commercial tv series and live events. Most sites and programs work for users from any country, only a few - like ABC - check the origin of a user and block access if he does not come from the allowed countries.
The first five episodes of the tv series Arrested Development have been released on MSN and can be viewed directly from the browser. As suspected the site only supports Internet Explorer and Media Player. If you are using a different browser or movie player it will ask you to download those programs from Microsoft and use them to view the show. This if of course a big drawback but fans will surely go the extra mile for this series.
Hamachi is a small freeware application that creates virtual private networks (vpn) on the fly without configuration at all - well almost. You can download the application from the hamachi homepage, once downloaded install and run the software. Versions for Windows, Linux (installation guide) and Macintosh OS X exist, means everyone should be happy although the linux and mac versions are console only while the windows one comes with a gui. Before I go into configuration details I want to describe the main advantage of Hamachi, it gives you LAN over the Internet.
I signed up with Relakks yesterday and was satisfied with this clean and easy process. I had to provide only some information like name, email, password and username and was able to log on to their system. My status was inactive at that time because I did not make a purchase yet. I decided to try the service for one month and had to provide my credit card details in order to do so. One month would cost 6$ which is a good price if they live up to their promises which are a) anonymous internet experience and b) maximum speed.
The Pirate Party is a swedish party that has three main goals: Protected Privacy, Free Knowledge and Shared Culture. They are making a bid for the Swedish parliament in the upcoming election and just introduced the worlds first commercial darknet called Relakks. Let us take a look at the definition of Relaks from the website:
A web proxy is becoming more and more important in todays internet. Schools and Companys tend to block sites pretty quickly nowadays, especially when the blocking is directed at just a few websites and not every website in that category. Web Proxys might be able to sneak past this policies and display the site in your browser even though it is banned in the network.
I have written a small php script that lookups your IP, your browser, the refering site and the remote port. The website has no ads at all and loads pretty fast. This might be useful for those who are using proxys and want to check if those proxys are spilling their IP address or not. The RIAA for example is identifying downloaders by their IP address.
A visitor of my site recommended this little application in a comment and I decided to give it a try and see how well it works. 3tunes is relativly stable considering the fact that it is still in alpha development stage. All you need is to download the file which is only about 20k in size and head to the pandora website. Once the first song starts playing you double click the 3tunes executable and it automatically shows the song which is currently played.
Pandora is a online service that finds similar music to an artist, album or genre that you specify and which creates your unique radio station that plays the related titles. Unfortunatly it´s only available on their website and not in music players like winamp. Until now, that is.
Yes, this is even better than the website that offered about 700 shows. Actually the 700 show website used content from guba.com as a source for their shows, but guba offers more of them. All videos belong to one of eight categories (cartoons, comedy, documentary, drama, foreign, miscellanous, music videos and sports).
Tracing a Hacker is a article aimed at beginners that want to learn the basics of finding out if there is someone connected to their system who should not be connected to it. It gives a rough introduction to some basic concepts like tcp/ip, ports and how hackers find their targets. This is a good read if you don´t know what they are about. After that Omar starts of by explaining the netstat command which lists all the sources that are connected or currently connecting to your computer. If you are running p2p software this can be a lot of connections. I suggest you start of by disabling most tools that you might be running while on the internet. So, no p2p, no messengers aso.
The question that many people ask is why would someone want to surf anonymously in the first place. Why would someone who does not do something illegal want to surf anonymously at all ? I can think of lots of reasons, here are a few:
This is a nice beginners tutorial that tells you how to trace people who try to break into your computer. It covers lots of explanations to questions like "How do these people find their victim?" and "What the phrases TCP/UDP actually mean".
