Thoughts from the UK: August 2011

Friday, August 19, 2011

How do I stop my ISP seeing my torrents

Your ISP will know that you are torrenting irrespective of what steps you take to mask your activity.They may not know what you are downloading but the sustained download has a distinct signature.

Even if you use a VPN service that uses encryption (tunneling) the signature of your activity will be such that your ISP will know what you are doing. The encryption will only prevent them knowing WHAT you are downloading.

It is not the ISP who detects or cares what you are downloading, it is the copyright holders that detect you when your IP address appears as part of a P2P seed-pool. The copyright holder then contacts your ISP as they have logged the fact that you are providing parts of their media. Your ISP may or may not have provided the APO with your IP address, this depends on the ISP.

In my case the copyright infringement letters are forwarded to me by my ISP who hopes that I will abide by their End User Agreements, which say that you are not allowed to download copyright material through your Internet connection.

Services such as BTGuard are likely to be blocked by large ISPs such as Rogers Cable and Bell Sympatico.

BTGuard and TorrentPrivacy now blocked

It looks like word has finally got out to the major ISPs that they should block these two services.

As they are the two most popular methods to download from P2P networks and avoid detection by copyright holders it makes sense that they would be candidates to be filtered out by the ISP firewalls.

As there are many VPN services that may or may not allow torrenting using their services, it does mean that they would be a far bigger target for the ISPs to block.

My pages on Torrenting and P2P:

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The TAC Shop

Maybe it is because that I am a bit of a pacifist, any enterprise that presents itself in this way should be target for criticism.

It could be a North American, good old boy, NRA (or the Canadian equivalent) thing, I am NOT A CANADIAN or North American by culture, but this is just not right (IMO).

OneWorldOffice - Private Militia stuff

The term "Red Neck" comes to mind.

Terry Bradshaw, TBU Security Solutions Inc. at the same address in Kelowna, BC

and, is there a connection between Terry Bradshaw and Wayne McAlpine?

TheTacShop was run from the same address as Zemana - not that there is any conclusion to be drawn here apart from there as a connection as they both seem to have been represented by OneWorldoffice.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

AV Paranoia and FUD

I am pretty much of the opinion that a lot of what the vendors of A-V and other computer security solutions tell you is in a large part FUD.

In a technological world the issue of security is one that there is a lot of spin! Due to the lack of understanding of what is actually going on - the paranoia of the masses runs rampant.

It would seem that a lot of folks are afraid to cross the street, let alone use their computers to actually do anything useful. Still, it all makes work for the vendors of operating systems, software and schemes to keep us all safe!

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Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson

Now this, in 2012, could be seen as a "blast from the past", but these two were masters at FUD

The Marcan Method to enable vt-x

The Marcan Method to enable vt-x on an Acer Aspire 8930g laptop (other makes and models probably can use this technique to unlock the hidden menus in an Insyde H2O UEFI BIOS.

Hector Marcan says:
The easiest way to enable the setting as far as I can see is to dump out the entire BIOS, patch the setting into the Setup variable (which is part of the data storage section - we aren't modifying any actual BIOS code, as this is the equivalent of changing a CMOS setting on other BIOSes), and then flash the resulting image. These laptops use a weird flash-behind-EC hardware solution for which there is no open flasher, so instead we can just use the normal BIOS flashing tool. In short, we'll flash the existing BIOS back on, but in the process also modify a Setup setting.

The list of programs below are those suggested for use by Hector Marcan in his blog - Abort, Retry, Hack?

These are the tools used by the "Marcan Technique"

The tools listed above were available for download from the Marcan Blog

Links:

Programming and Systems on The Technology Muse
All pages relating to unlocking your UEFI BIOS
Pre-Boot Environments - UEFI and BIOS

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Google Analysis

Using Google Analysis.

Things need to be uploaded from tempusfugit.ca on this.

WARNING: Stream does not start with requested FLV frame, ignoring data...

Funny really.

My method of using get_iplayer still works and the mailing list goes in ever smaller circles.

Monday, August 1, 2011

My Digital Life

Some of my observations

Having come across many references to My Digital Life web pages and forum quotes in my research of many topics including Windows 7 Activation techniques, I feel that a few comments and observations of my own are in order. While the antics of many who participate in their forums is a mixed bag, the web site itself seems to be primarily a front for monetization for its owners.

Links: