Wednesday 21 January 2009
Tuesday 20 January 2009
How Boxxy blew up the internet
Saw this is the Guardian today, think it says a lot about modern life and the internet. Apologies for now printing the article, but The Guardian get intense about that sort of thing and the emails fly, so here is the link
Luckily, Youtube is more mellow
Note to 40 plus readers, this could well be real!
Luckily, Youtube is more mellow
Note to 40 plus readers, this could well be real!
Sunday 18 January 2009
Hub of things
After a fairly hefty bill from those lovely people at British Telecom Internet for excess internet usage over Christmas I reluctantly concluded that I was going to have to move from my BT option 1 10gb allowance to their Unlimited option. Having just set up my own PC repair firm and with a tendency to have internet TV and Radio on the go while I am working, the decision to move to an unlimited tariff was something of a no-brainer compared to the excess charges. BT sweetened the deal with the offer of a free Home hub.
For those unfamiliar with Home hub its essentially a proprietary wireless router for BT users; a rather stylish concave black affair minus the usual collection of aerials, four blue LED's show power, wireless, internet and telephone status. The router allows you to add a second phone via the router and VOIP and BT boast that international calls can be made for around 1p a minute. Calls to the UK at weekends and the evenings are free. Each hub is equipped with its own telephone number, mine starts with 05 a number which up to number I have associated with premium rate numbers which only goes to show what I know!
I had heard some horror stories about installing Home hub on Windows machines and as a Linux user suspected that things would be difficult. As it turned out I could not have been more wrong. Once the router was plugged in and the Ethernet hooked up it was simply a matter of rebooting my PC and I was connected. For windows users there is a CD with a setup.exe although it looks like a standard Ethernet connection to me.
The Home hub, aside from acting as a VOIP link also supports USB. I plugged an external hard drive and the hub recognised it as part of the network. To date I have not had time to check speeds or if it will stream media. If it does it could be a very useful feature indeed.
As a router, speed have been good and the interface is fairly clear. I can't find any mention of NAT or Port forwarding but I may have missed something. But for now at least 8/10 and it could get better.
For those unfamiliar with Home hub its essentially a proprietary wireless router for BT users; a rather stylish concave black affair minus the usual collection of aerials, four blue LED's show power, wireless, internet and telephone status. The router allows you to add a second phone via the router and VOIP and BT boast that international calls can be made for around 1p a minute. Calls to the UK at weekends and the evenings are free. Each hub is equipped with its own telephone number, mine starts with 05 a number which up to number I have associated with premium rate numbers which only goes to show what I know!
I had heard some horror stories about installing Home hub on Windows machines and as a Linux user suspected that things would be difficult. As it turned out I could not have been more wrong. Once the router was plugged in and the Ethernet hooked up it was simply a matter of rebooting my PC and I was connected. For windows users there is a CD with a setup.exe although it looks like a standard Ethernet connection to me.
The Home hub, aside from acting as a VOIP link also supports USB. I plugged an external hard drive and the hub recognised it as part of the network. To date I have not had time to check speeds or if it will stream media. If it does it could be a very useful feature indeed.
As a router, speed have been good and the interface is fairly clear. I can't find any mention of NAT or Port forwarding but I may have missed something. But for now at least 8/10 and it could get better.
Friday 16 January 2009
Monday 5 January 2009
Police to hack your PC
Police have been given the power to hack into personal computers without a court warrant and the Home Office faces the threat of a legal challenge after granting permission to allow Police to do this. Ministers are also drawing up plans to allow police across the EU to collect information from computers in Britain. The moves will further claims of a "Big Brother Society" where the often spurious accounts of combating terrorism and the recently promoted public enemy number, the paedophile, are used to allow police access to ever larger amounts of private information
Hacking – known as "remote searching" – has been quietly adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups are worried that its usage will be expanded without any form of control.
Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing habits to a distant surveillance team. Alternatively, "key-logging" devices can be inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network. Users who are worried about this might want to check incoming emails and refuse any which look suspicious; set their email client to strip out HTML and receive only text (less pretty, but less prone to hacking) and to make sure their Network is encrypted. User may also want to think about using proxy servers as an additional layer of protection againts intrusion and access to your IP address.
The police say that computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action is proportionate to the crime being investigated. But the recent record of the police in a propotionate reaction to a situation will not bring comfort to many users!
Dominic Grieve, shadow Home Secretary, asked how it would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place.
Police carried out 194 hacking operations in 2007-08 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 in hotel rooms. The spokesman said such surveillance was regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
The Government faces criticism over the erosion of civil liberties on a series of fronts. It is working on plans for a giant "big brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain's policy of retaining samples from people never convicted of a crime – including children – breaches human rights.
I wonder what Dixon of Dock Green would have said? "Evening all!"
Hacking – known as "remote searching" – has been quietly adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups are worried that its usage will be expanded without any form of control.
Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing habits to a distant surveillance team. Alternatively, "key-logging" devices can be inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network. Users who are worried about this might want to check incoming emails and refuse any which look suspicious; set their email client to strip out HTML and receive only text (less pretty, but less prone to hacking) and to make sure their Network is encrypted. User may also want to think about using proxy servers as an additional layer of protection againts intrusion and access to your IP address.
The police say that computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action is proportionate to the crime being investigated. But the recent record of the police in a propotionate reaction to a situation will not bring comfort to many users!
Dominic Grieve, shadow Home Secretary, asked how it would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place.
Police carried out 194 hacking operations in 2007-08 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 in hotel rooms. The spokesman said such surveillance was regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
The Government faces criticism over the erosion of civil liberties on a series of fronts. It is working on plans for a giant "big brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain's policy of retaining samples from people never convicted of a crime – including children – breaches human rights.
I wonder what Dixon of Dock Green would have said? "Evening all!"
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