The cake is a lie: IE team bakes a treat for Mozilla

In honor of tuesday’s Firefox 3 release, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team gave a cake to Mozilla. The tasty treat, which prominently displays IE’s blue “e” icon, arrived at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View.

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Twitter Saves Berkeley Student Arrested in Egypt

Buck, 29, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project. He was released the next day. You can link twitter to you facebook and IM service. I think it’s a really innovative idea.

read more | digg story

Malware

There are a bunch of lonely people with no social life whatsoever who have nothing better to do than make other people’s lives miserable. They are called malware writers. They have advanced programming skills and are very well-educated in networking and therefore decide to infiltrate other people’s computers with malicious programs “just for fun”. Well, that’s how it used to be.Our bored losers have realized that they are losers and have no money, no jobs and instead are exploiting the growth of online finance. Now you have malware that comes in all shapes and forms, but you rarely get viruses by themselves any more. In fact, malware is the new robbery. You want to make money fast? Learn how to program in Java. There are several different methods of exploiting people and by far the most frustrating are the flash-drive infections. They spread from computer to computer infecting people by the seconds. There are many different types, but all of them can be removed using this tool. Make sure all your flash drives are plugged in and run the tool.

The trojan horse is named after the trojan horse of Troy, for those of you who have read the iliad or seen the motion picture. The greeks failed to enter the walls of the city of Troy and tricked thetrojans into thinking they gave up and left them a gift. The gift was a giant horse. Little did the trojans know that the horse was stuffed full of Greeks. They therefore brought the horse within the city and in the middle of the night the Greeks burned down the city. The trojan horse is an application which pretends to be a software which a naive user might willingly install, and then damages the system by either providing a way for the hacker to access the victim’s files or take control of the computer.

Phishing is a method of gaining victims’ financial information using an e-mail which looks almost identical to one sent from a bank or paypal which requests that you verify your user information. It is a relatively new form of online fraud but one which has gained sky-high popularity and had been extremely successful.

Spyware is a general term for anything such as a trojan horse or a keylogger (an application that stores everything you type into your keyboard and therefore can determine your passwords) or anything which stores information about the victim.

Adware is a general term for a program which generates pop-ups and advertisements on your computers. You can imagine how much a corporation would pay to have their logo pop-up on victims’ monitors every 5 minutes. Also very frustrating.

So there’s a lot of stuff out there. But how can you stay immune? Well, there is a very wonderful program called HijackThis. Recently purchased by the security company Trend Micro, HijackThis is a diagnostic application which tells you what runs on your PC when you turn it on, what attaches itself to your browser and basically looks in every place an infection would hide. HijackThis reports are not easy to read, and there are experianced experts out there in the online community who are more than happy to help you solve your problems using HijackThis. Do not attempt to fix your computer using HijackThis yourself! You can very easily cause substantial damage to your PC.

The best thing to do is to download HijackThis from here and save it to your desktop. Extract it from the compressed folder and run it. Click on “Do a system scan and save a logfile”. Remember; don’t fix any entries. Copy and paste everything in the text file into a forum online giving details about any problems you are experiencing and wait for a reply.

I recommend any of the following forums:

• Tech Support Guy
• Bleeping Computer
• Castlecops
• Spyware Info
• Tech Support Forum

You can also learn how to remove malware from other people’s computers and become part of the online community against malware. If you want to learn how to remove malware and fight for the good side, Click Here. But bear in mind that training will take a couple of years and is not easy, so only join if you really feel dedicated.

The timid NAS

The Network Attached Storage has always been, in my opinion, one of the most useful pieces of hardware that one could find in a household of 3 or more computers. The reason I believe this to be the case is the pure practicality of having such a device. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, the majority of end-users still seem to be unaware of the importance of backing up files. There are over a thousand different ways that you PC could lose all its data immediately making it very difficult to recover anything. Investing in a device such as an external hard disk is very important and becoming more and more popular. But a NAS is one step ahead. So what is this NAS thing I keep referring to?

A Network Attached Storage device is something which is attached to a computer network and made accessible to all the users on that network. It houses one or more hard disks which can be used for multiple purposes; the first and foremost being a central backup location. If you have many computers in your house and want to back them all up regularly, you can simply set all the computers to back up on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. This means you no longer have to worry about backing up your computer. Just leave it on before you sleep and it’ll back up and turn off by itself. Beautiful. You can also use the NAS as a print server. The majority of printers on the market today are USB 2.0 and do not usually allow for network expansion which therefore means only you can print from it. Yes, you can always connect your printer to a PC and share it, but that means the PC connected to the printer has to be on all the time. Nicht Gut. Most NAS devices come with one or two USB ports so this solves your problem. You can plug your printer into your NAS! You can also use the device as a central storage location for you household. You can put all your music files on there and set up your music library to simply link to your library instead of duplicating a library 12 times. All your family photos and valuable info can go on there for safe storage, and best of all, you can set it up as an FTP server. This means that if you’re on holiday in Taiwan and really want to listen to access your files, it’s only a step away. Type in the IP of your NAS in a browser (or a domain name if you’ve set one up for the NAS) and type in your username and password. The Network Attached Storage device is a necessity for “wired” households and, although it’s been around for years, it hasn’t been exploited to its pull potential.

Microsoft has obviously seen the need for such a device and made a new operating system called Windows Home Server. This software is seen by Microsoft as “better than NAS devices”. I don’t think this is entirely true. Windows Home Server is just extremely easy to use whereas NAS requires a bit more networking knowledge to set up and maintain. It’s up to you to make the choice. The home server option however, is going to be a lot more expensive. The Microsoft OS costs a dollar under $600 for the 500MB version and increases for the terabyte version. Then you have to take the price of the hardware into consideration. NAS suddenly becomes considerably cheap when you can get it for about $400 for a 1-terabyte device.

I hope you see now why the NAS is such a useful device. My personal favourite is the Maxtor Shared Storage II. Check it out.

My p2p dilemma

File-sharing is illegal. I’m sure everyone is well aware of this thanks to the large amount of anti-piracy and anti-theft marketing schemes such as the “you wouldn’t steal” advert below which is shown before you watch a rented movie:

You see, I am in a huge dilemma as to whether I should download or not. The problem is, all the software and movies and games and music are just too expensive for one to consider buying in the real world when there is an alternative such as the Internet. In this aspect, I agree completely with the greens. Why should consumers have to suffer the prices which monopolies such as Adobe attach to their products. Has anyone purchased the Creative Suite 3 Master Collection recently? That’s a huge hole in one’s pocket which can be dodged with a simple download. Who in their right mind would spend $2,500 on buying software when they could download it for free?

What’s the risk of downloading? Well, for one, it’s illegal. You could get fined thousands of dollars for downloading and get your computer confiscated by your government. You might even spend some time in jail if you’re a major offender. Demonoid, my favourite bittorrent tracker, was shut down early November by the authorities who raided their servers and took them off the Internet. Since then I have been using The Pirate Bay and still take great joy in reading their response to legal threats from Multi-national corporations such as Microsoft.

If firms didn’t try to rip off all their potential consumers, I doubt there would be as much downloading as there is. Until then, The Pirate Bay is staying on my bookmarks.

Extra Reading:

• Jean-Claude Elias – With software, rent is always due.

The Internet Explained

Not many people are fully aware of how the Internet really works, even though they use it on a daily basis and are higly computer-literate. The Internet is always something that’s just been there, no questions asked. Read on if you want a basic outline into how the Internet really does work.
Far too many people are under the impression that the Internet is based somewhere or is a huge room filled with high-spec servers which you connect to every time you connect to the Internet. This misconception might have come from the early Dial-up Internet which required one to have to enter a username and password to connect. The Internet is actually just the largest network of computers known to man. Very simple really. You are connected to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) such as Virgin or Cable & Wireless; your ISP is then in turn connected to the rest of the country which is then in turn connected to all neighboring countries. In theory, If you have an Internet connection which links you to your ISP through cable or your phone lines such as DSL or Dial-up, you could actually trace the wiring all the way to anywhere on the world with Internet providing there were no wireless networks on the way. Pretty cool.

An IP or Internet Protocol address is a unique number which identifies you on the internet. To be connected to the net you have to have a valid real IP address which is not in use by anyone else. This basically means that everything you do online is easily watched. An IP address consists of 4 sections known as octets, each containing a number up to 3 digits in length like xx.xxx.x.xxx. When you subscribe to the web with you ISP, they either give you a static or dynamic IP address. As the name suggests, a static IP is one which doesn’t change at all as a pose to a dynamic IP which might change every time you connect. There are also IP addresses which are not assigned by ISPs to connect to the internet as they are reserved for private networks. It’s not just the internet which you need to have an IP address, but any network, and so there are a some octects such as those beginning with 192 which are reserved solely for private networks. So why wouldn’t you get a static real IP address to keep for every time you connect to the internet? Well, the answer is simple really. There are not enough IP addresses to go around. There are only 4,294,967,296 possible different IP addresses and take away those which are reserved for purposes such as private networks, you end up with less than 3 billion addresses. Can anyone imagine why that might be a problem? Well, with coorporations like microsoft grabbing millions of real IP addresses for itself rather selfishly, IP addresses run out very fast. In fact, Microsoft has more IP addresses for itself than some countries such as Lebanon. Due to the shortage, static IP addresses become really expensive in countries such as these, with the service hitting almost $80 a month.

So what’s going to happen when we run out of IP addresses? Well, there is actually a new version of IP addresses known as IPv6 which is being implemented as we speak. There are 3.40282367 x10³⁸ unique addressed with IPv6 so The right to real IP can be added to the universal declaration of human rights.

DHCP is not as confusing as it sounds. It really isn’t. Basically there’s a server sitting in the ISP’s HQ which handles every request to connect to the internet. Every network device such as your network card in you computer or your wireless network card, or even any phone with bluetooth has what’s called a MAC address (don’t worry there’s 281,474,976,710,656 of those) which the DHCP server can identify with. It then gives each MAC address an IP address from the ISP’s list and sends it sailing away.

So where does the website or file-transfer fit into the equation? Well, that’s actually pretty simple. Seeing as every computer has an IP address, you can connect to that computer (providing you have the right permissions) and access all the shared files on it. So you could, in theory, type in a random IP address into your browser and providing the IP was valid, the computer was online, and there were shared files in existence on that computer, and you had permission to see that list, you could see all that info. So every time you connect to a website, you are basically seeing text files on the server you’re connecting to. But I doubt you’ve ever used 216.239.51.99 to hit google before. Because the people who founded the net wanted to make life easier for you, they invented DNS. DNS stands for Domain Name Severs. It basically means that you can type a domain name such as www.google.com into your browser instead of 216.239.51.99 and redirect you to that IP address. Your ISP has a huge database with the list of domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. Life made easy. This technology is why a new website might take up to 48 hours to get fully up and running; it has to register with ISPs all over the world.

The Internet may sound confusing and be littered with tech jargon, but it’s actually a really simple concept in theory. A bit harder in practice. If this article left you with any questions or you didn’t understand anything, you can always e-mail me.