Anti P2P Organizations ap2p

In the age where governments are tuning off access to the Internet because of protesters organizing rallys and general revolt over oppressive regimes the notion that companies that have copyright material engage in activities that are contra the efforts of those illegally downloading their property is preposterous.

The blocking of such agents from your home computer is singularly ineffective in protecting you from detection and from downloading "malware-ridden" torrents. List such as nexus23 ipfilterx and Bluetack with programs such as PeerBlock are a useless waste of time, IMO.

Links:

• Systems pages on this blog
• More information on Torrenting

DropBox

This is my review of DropBox

RAD Media Corp

The screen-shots were taken from Google search made  on 17th April 2011. (***please note: April 2011 NOT 2012)

RAD Media Corp are obviously connected to OneWorld Office and Terry Bradshaw - Terry Bradshaw can clearly be seen on the VATSIS website as a Director and CEO - where his successes at OneWorld are cited.
OneWorld Data Recovery services had an email address for terry.bradshaw@radmediacorp.com

Also, searching for radmediacorp.com I found the following (above) in the Google cache but it would appear that the rest of the web content has been removed from the Google index as Google was returning Google 404 pages. The reason that I had made the search *** was that I was curious to see who was involved with the screen dump that I saw when I was looking at OneWorldOffice - I was NOT told this by anyone, it was purely from research conducted on the Internet.

However there was a Google graphic of the cached page.

the Google cache when searching for radmediacorp.com

TorButton Updates and Firefox

update to torbutton breaks tor geoip - forums.cnet.com

An example of an unsafe web form

During my investigations into the configuration of a website and looking into the various methods of providing a feedback mechanism, I came across an example that illustrated how a web form could reveal information that you did not want revealed.

Although the information was visible on my computer screen, and it normally would have been hidden, it would have been easy to reveal it by looking at the source for the webpage. This is if the script had not been linked from a page that was in a protected directory.

MessageBody = MessageBody & "Message: " & Trim(Request.Form("message")) '
change to address of your own SMTP server strHost =
"mail.oneworldsafedisk.com" If Request("Submit") <> "" Then Set Mail =

Server.CreateObject("Persits.MailSender") ' enter valid SMTP host Mail.Host =
strHost Mail.Username = "contact@oneworldsafedisk.com" Mail.Password =
"r@pevan" Mail.From = "contact@oneworldsafedisk.com" Mail.FromName =
"OneWorld SafeDisk" Mail.AddAddress "terry.bradshaw@radmediacorp.com"
'Mail.AddAddress "robert.douglas@oneworldoffice.com" Mail.AddAddress
"robert.siemons@radmediacorp.com" Mail.AddAddress
"wayne.mcalpine@oneworldoffice.com" Mail.AddAddress
"formlog@oneworldoffice.com" ' message subject Mail.Subject = "OneWorld
SafeDisk - Contact Us

The text above was echoed back in my web browser when I pressed the "Submit" button on a web form that had a script that had not been fully debugged. The information is from the hidden fields within the form, these should never be visible to a visitor to a website.

 I posted the text as it appeared on my screen.

• Unsafe web forms
• Scripts in general 

nexus23 ipfilterx

What Nexus23 say about themselves:

IpfilterX blocks Anti-P2P companies and the organizations that support them, Corporations, Military Ranges, Government Agencies, Law Firms, P2P spammers and many more.

I came accross this filter when I was researching some of the nonsense that is associated with blocking peers in the attempt to avoid detection while downloading torrents.

I don't care if you believe me that this filter is useless and continue to think that this nonsense is going to protect your identity while downloading from p2p. I have no stake in this argument but if you want advice on this subject I suggest you read on.

A quote from the nexus23 dot org website:

....... Whom we contend are the key members of conspiracy against peer to peer networks and their innocent users.

There was not much to clip on the nexus23.org website - in fact it looks  rather "gamey" - the developer, Karl, seems to be a member of the SourceForge community. This doesn't really improve the product.

KarlX seems to be having problems in getting funding for his development and says that he will not have any more updates. There also seems to be a fair amount of acromony against Bluetack. I have a screen-shot of a screen-shot from the Bluetack website where Karl is attacking Fakir.

Links related to blocking peers:

• All about Peer Blocking

WhoIs Look-up

This is service offered by many websites and domain registrars to allow, or at least partially, identify the owner and operator of a website or the owner of a Domain Name.

If you are concerned about your anonymity you can use these services to check who you appear to be when you are on the Internet.

• Vidalia/Tor on The Technology Muse
• Using the Tor Browser package
• How your individual device can be identified on the Internet
• Looking for yourself on the Internet 

The information that you obtain is only a first order indication of the identity of the visitor to a web resource. Much of the information is withheld and can easily be spoofed.

Some examples of these services:
 These are some of the services that I have used.

• ip-lookup.net

Canon Download SDK v 2.10

When I first tried to download the Canon SDK (version 2.10) the download screen screen was blank and there was no option to agree and proceed.

The download froze on the license agreement page.

It should look like:


You then get the application form to fill in:


This form can be accessed directly if you know the URL and the download can be made aa normal.

Links on this blog relating to the Canon SDKs:

• Systems and Programming on The Technology Muse
• Canon Pages
• The location of the resources discussed on this blog

Terabyte Storage

This is part of the digital media project.  The aim here is to had a centralized  server with up to and exceeding 1000G of storage and provide a home for all my music, digital books, media downloads and photographs.

How to locate and edit torrc

To get Vidalia Tor to perform in the desired manner, exit in a specific geographic location or to do so randomly, you need to edit the configuration file torrc appropriately and toggle the proxy settings of your browser.

You can use any browser with Tor as long as you can tell the browser to connect using Tor. There is an add-in for Firefox called TorButton, this automates the toggling of the networking settings and is not necessary for the operation of Tor.

• The Minimal torrc file - Configuration file for Vidalia Tor and iPlayer 
• Specifying a specific country in the torrc file - not that the image below shows an Exit Node located in India.

You can easily locate the torrc file by using the search in the Windows 7 Start menu. It can be edited using Windows Notepad or any other text editor.

Blog comes of age

The time has come that this blog is no longer a "feed" for my website.
I don't really care if visitors go to my website and if they do it is likely to be the result of a search and not a referral from this blog.

This blog is still a primary means by which I can determine what people are searching the Internet for.

There are some subjects that I no longer have interest in and some of these posts have been deleted from this blog. Some of these subject include the modification of Insyde h2o BIOS and comparative reviews of BTGuard and TorrentPrivacy.

The fact that visitors to my website from this blog do not understand why and how I have setup the security on my website has prompted this change in Feb 2011. If you visit the home, or root page, of my site you will probably not get anywhere - this is my intention, there is no general index and links to pages that you may be interested on my site.

There are links that can be followed by robots such as Googlebot and they ARE spidered on a regular basis.

This is an example of the kind of response that triggered this change:

I'm trying to get information from you about Torrent-Privacy. I go through all this milarky and cannot sign on even when I set my security to accept transfer to you!

What? Are you a fake for the government? I am not able to afford buying much of anything in this economy. I have no job, and rely on torrents to get information, amusement, etc. Believe me, I've been trying to find a job, but to no avail.

I think if you are not the government, you are unduly paranoid.

anyone else

I don't think that overly paranoid and I am certainly not masquerading as any government (US, Canadian or anywhere else in the world). The question "Anyone else?" needed to be posted in a global fashion so that it could be answered. I replied to the email, but I have yet to receive a response.

It does need to be stated, however, that I have little continuing interest in reviewing TorrentPrivacy and discussing whether it is a scam. I do a lot of P2P (file sharing) and it is still of general interest how the governance of such activity is going to pan out globally in future.

Relakks

What Relakks say:

Protect yourself and your family against surveillance. Simply preserve your integrity online with a hidden IP-number via proxy and VPN-encryption.

• iPredator website
• Relakks Website
• The torrentfreak.com article    - 17/06/2010 - about the deficiencies in iPredator
• iPredator on The Technology Muse

Sandy Bridge Fiasco

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

Luckily Intel fanboys are are ones that are going to be making the most noise and clamoring for a recall or a rebate.

The SATA 6G problem is not likely to be a problem - but there is the "seeds of doubt" and not getting what you paid for issues.

I can only wish Intel the best on this one. I feel some sort of poetic justice here and be pleased that I have decided on AMD and am a shareholder.