Archive for the 'Routers & networks' category

You can browse, but you can’t hide… from your browser.

Actually, your browser knows a lot about you. Some scientists believe that from your browsing habits they can recognize fairly precisely if you’re a man or a woman.

Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

Be patient, it may be long.

According to it, I am a man…

This is exactly why I am quite happy to live in France: We have a reasonably priced broadband offering. Most 20Mbps ADSL services are price around 29.99€ per month.

I thought about this when I saw that in the US, CableVision was offering 100Mbps at 99$ per month (and AT&T offers 18Mbps for 80$ per month).

Competition is king for driving broadband (ADSL or cable) prices down.

While I had a long love affair with BitComet as my prefered BitTorrent client, it happens that I currently prefer to use the lean and clean uTorrent software. It is a bit smaller (but it has a tendency to eat up memory if left serving files for a long time -it’s ok if you stick to downloading) and it has a nice little interface that is clean and easily understandable.

As with many a BitTorrent client, µTorrent or uTorrent tends to have a relatively complex configuration. Many options, some of them utterly cryptic, a lot of them with a possible impact on performance. After months of tweaking, I think that I have obtained a configuration that is clearly optimized to download several giga-byte-sized packages (videos/movies, Linux distributions, full databases, etc.) on a fast ADSL connection (20Mbit/s, here).

So I was suggested to share it with all the ones who want to try and get quickly a BitTorrent connection working as fast as possible.

All the options

I don’t need to explain the choice of language (µTorrent has one great advantage of having such a large choice for localization).

I did not install IPv6 support (my ISP does not support it), but it is a very critical item to check because -as soon as it becomes readily available- it will bring a significant layer of compression and obfuscation to avoid your ISP throttling down your P2P traffic (as some US and Canada ISPs currently do; Shame on them!).

I don’t care receiving the beta upgrades (I’m all for the stability of software) and I favor browsing as anonymously as reasonably possible.

Since I am working at home, there is no need for the anti-boss key.

Download: I prefer to immediately pre-allocate file size (rather than seeing the software program stop later because it has been eating up all disk space), and I don’t want to the PC to shut itslef down while downloading. While it is generally good to reduce electricity consumption, stopping in mid-transfer is not good for the efficiency of the whole process.
(more…)

Some have been surprised by one little habit of mine around my PC (I should say ‘my PCs”): I keep a detailled log of everything I do on my PC in a plain old school paper book. It may be a software installation, a parameter change on another software package, the update of a driver. Everything goes in there.

Main advantage: When my PC stops working perfectly, I can easily recognize what changed. Usually, I (like everybody else) say that I did not touch anaything before it stopped working. Bit when I check, I can find wat I did.

It also works for the configuration of a Local Area Network… even in a company. But beware of not writing down passwords that would then be left in an open paper book…

As you certainly already know if you follow regularly this web site, the Internet addresses will soon be depleted (all used). The end of the Internet world as we know it should be reached around 2011 or 2012. That is the reason why some companies are working to push out the most common Internet protocol (IPv4) and to make space for its successor (IPv6).

This is why, while the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was preparing a night without IPv4 to reach the largest possible public, Google launched a version of its search engine reserved to IPv6: ipv6.google.com (If you are like almost everybody, you will not see anything at the end of the link).

Now, we all have to switch as soon as possible.

…with this long list of proxies (unfortunately, some or many of them may not work for all people).

(more…)

While everybody is speaking about downloads under surveillance of law enforcement forces and **AA groups defending the copyrights of music and cinema, I wondered where the download addicts were going now to get their load of big files.

I looked into the P2P networks heavily protected by a strong encryption and supposed to guarantee the anonymity of their uses (often named darknets). this claim seems to be well defended, but the available contents are limited and strongly influenced by the fight for liberties (and sometimes against the most paranoid conspirations) and very marginal behaviours (pedophily is really more present there than in the more common Internet you and me use everyday).

But I was also directed toward the Usenet newsgroups. It is clear that a large number of users are living a free life far from the preening eyes of most external observers. As a matter of fact, if you download from your ISP’s news server, the data flow is only visible by yor ISP and yourself. Nothing goes into the open Internet. Of course, some ISP decided to limit access to some of the newsgroups, but choice is still quite large and your tranquility is much more preserved than on a P2P network (and less than on a fully anonymous darknet).

What tools do you need to browse the newsgroups? A little more technical attention than on the simplest P2P networks, for sure. But the tools are relatively easy to find:

• A Usenet reader able to correctly read the posts containing attached file. You have to remember that more of these files are actually cut in parts, attached one by one to different posts and encoded using standard but very specific protocols. The most convincing free tool -for me- was Grabit for Windows that seems able to decode nearly anything, grabbing parts from different messages and sticking them together in files or directories. Most important, it understands how to work with *.NZB files that describe all the parts, all their locations, etc. for one attached file set.
• A software tool able to work with *.PAR2 files that allow to run around the transmission errors (with the help of one sophisticated encoding, they can compensate for missing data or corrupted data, etc.) Here, I prefered QuickPar for Windows, one more free tool.

Note: Normally, Grabit doe sit all, but QuickPar for Windows still comes handy in case of failure.

The most impressive part of my tests has been download performance. 13 Mbit/s, I did not see this for a long time. The more because it was sustained for days (it goes down a little because of minor trafic jams at my ISP in the evening).

But you have to notice that if you look for a specific data content, newsgroups are not helping you. The way they are organized is favoring a lot the exploitation of very young content. If newsgroup search engines exist (Grabit has one that is partially submitted to subscriptions), the Usenet system will only host young data or data recently published.

Titled “Wire Your Living Room Over Wi-Fi with a Bridge“, a post from LifeHacker.

With subjects like:

• Why a Wireless Bridge?
• How a Wireless Bridge Works
• Setting Up the Wireless Bridge (a Buffalo airstation)

I noticed two important announcements for airline passengers. Things will be changing in terms of accepting new technologies useful for most international frequent flyers:

• GSM mobile phones will be accepted in planes by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority. But prices may be hard on your wallet, of course. [1]
• American Airlines to start WiFi broadband service in planes as soon as 2008. Same risk on prices… [2]

Surprising? Not really. We know for a long that there is no technical problem, just nobody was willing to try (in the airline companies and the public authorities).

If you want to do discreet (if not completely anonymous) P2P, Bittorrent and Gnutella or Kazaa are not your friends. With the advent of more attention from authorities, it is difficult to consider them as good opportunities.

I have been looking quickly at some of the possible solutions to protect your privacy while exchanging files over the Internet. I found the following ideas:

• Omemo is a recent Spanish development. I tried it and it is very obvious that the program is still in beta. Essentially, I was unable to download a file if it was not very small in size or to upload any. Let’s wait until it works.
• GigaTribe seems a good solution if you are willing to pay for the Premium package. It builds a closed network with your friends, but the standard (free) software is not able to grab files from multiple computers at the same time. So performance is very limited for the free version. GigaTribe3 is said to correct a number of issues some time later in 2008.
• Freenet is rather difficult to use at first, but if you run Thaw, one of the applications provided at installation, you will get a large choice of file downloads and performance while limited is not ridiculous: A few days for 2GB of video, it could be much worse. However, some may be troubled by the kind of data found there: While the common P2P data can be observed, you will also find conspiracy-related information and a quite significant load of pornography and child pornography (normally not found on the more open Internet).

I don’t know where the future of P2P lies, but it is certainly around some of these darknets (networks that are protected from external Peeping Toms). Freenet is supposed to be the best and most secured one, even if it is not perfect (it seems clear that some powerful agencies have setup some Freenet nodes in order to be able to spy the traffic).

Thanks to LifeHacker, and if you have the following, you will be able to use your iPhone to access Internet from your laptop.

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Source: LifeHacker “Use Your iPhone’s Internet Connection On Your Laptop [Feature]“.

Sometimes, you make a heavy use of a FTP server. But it is tiresome to go to a separate program in order to copy files to and from this server. There is an easy solution under Windows: Add a FTP server onto a disk drive letter.

For this, thanks to CyberNetNews explanations, you can map a networked drive.

What could be the use of network hard disk drive of one Tera-Byte which would strictly refuse to serve files because there may be a risk of breaching licensing agreement potentially applicable to them? This is the question that potential buyers should ask before purchasing the Western Digital disc drives using WD Anywhere Access: WD My Book World Edition.

There is a long list of file suffixes that cannot be shared on a network (even a local one) on this type of hard disc drive.

In my opinion, a WD My Book World Edition disc is defintely worthless. You cannot usefully put on it an MP3 file, and AVI file, a TMP file, a QuickTime video or a Windows Media video. Western Digital seems worried that you may not have the licensing rights for these. So they don’t want you to use them. Leave those Western Digital discs at he irresponsible stores which are selling them or bring them back.

When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:

• How To: Control Ubuntu from Windows
• How To: Build a BitTorrent box
• Run Linux apps on Windows.. kinda (X-Windows system on MS-Windows)

Tom’s Hardware just compared 7 online services for online storage of data.

Take your storage online

The excellent LifeHacker web site has a good list of top network utilities.

Personal research: What are the web sites best ranked for a Google search on the first figures? The results are… interesting:

• 0 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 1 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 2 : w3.org (Google search)
• 3 : 3.co.uk UK telephone operator (Google search)
• 4 : channel4.org TV channel (Google search)
• 5 : five.tv TV channel (Google search)
• 6 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 7 : au.tv.yahoo.com TV guide (Google search)
• 8 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 9 : NineMsn.com.au Microsoft + TV channel (Google search)

Wikipedia collects it when nobody wants them, but TV channels are hoarding the numbers.