They were the FPS games of your youth (if you are as old as I am): Doom, Heretic and Hexen are three games where you killed, maimed, crushed, punched and powdered thousands of monsters and all kinds of adversaries. Did you know that you could play all three of them on line?

Point your browser to the Doom Triple Pack.

On-line Doom + Hexen + Heretic

Apple is not only delivering sleek computer designs and nice little mobile phones. They are also producing a good web browser: Safari.

It’s new version, Safari 4, is just out. Faster, still as good and powerful, but Apple is now claiming the crown for the “fastest” web browser. It could well be possible when Snow Leopard OS-X becomes available later this year. Running natively as a 64-bit Mac application, it could gain 50% from today’s already powerful base of Safari 4.

Safari version 4

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.

I’ve been using and recommending the Opera web browser for many years. It’s a kind of a Firefox where everything you need would be directly included rather than having to download extensions. And it’s fast too. For mobile applications (PDAs, mobile phones, etc.) Opera Mini is probably the best possible option and it is in a tight competition for the market leader position.

Now, Opera is launching a beta test version 10 of the browser. And it has amazingly interesting new features.

• Fast browsing on slow connections
• Tab browsing enhanced and flexible
• Speed dial from the empty new page
• Web mail integration
• Re-sizable search field
• Much faster web engine and impressively standards-compliant
• In-line spell checker (I use it a lot to support my blogging habits)
• Auto-update (better than merely asking you to check for updates)
• Mouse control

Even better, after testing it in alpha, I can tell you that it is quite stable. The beta version should stay that way and that is a good thing too.

You can download it here.

Hollywood in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s created a long string of cheap horror movies that never reached the top rating lists. However, some of them, despite being left mostly abandonned by their authors, are worthy of some renewed attention. In this context, it is interesting to notice that the Internet Archive has recently pointed to a nice list of these B horror movies. In there, you will find (available for free download):

• Attack of the Giant Leeches
• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms
• Horrors of Spider Island
• Killers from Space
• Bloody Pit of Horror
• The Satanic Rites of Dracula
• Werewolf of Washington
• Killer Shrews
• The Giant Gila Monster

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.