I have been using Astraweb for over a year now as my Usenet provider.. Speeds have been great.. I always max out at 2.07MB/s which is the max speed of my Internet.. I have never experienced a downtime with Astraweb and they offer SSL connections! They offer many packages but really the DSL Special is all you need.. No speed limit, no transfer limit, ssl support, US/EU servers, 20 connections and 688day retention which is growing daily! At $11.00USD/month you really cant go wrong.. Beats Netflix for me..

Just my 2 cents..

So Just thought I would post a follow up..

I have been using Gomez Peer Zone trouble free for almost 2 years now.. I signed up in December of 2008 and have been using it on all my computers since.. There has been a few months which i didnt make the payout minimum ($5.00) but those were months when i had most of my stuff in storage or was moving or was not near a computer very long.. But the balance has always rolled over to the following month. As of this moment my total earnings from Gomez Peer is..

Lifetime Earnings: $71.96
Current Account Balance: $4.00
Earnings Close Date: 2010/07/31

Gomez though has been late at making payments sometimes has always come through with payments.. I have tested the client on the following OS’s WinXP (SP0,SP1,SP2,SP3)/Vista (32/64bit)/Win7 (32/64bit)/Server 2003/Server 2008 and seems to run just fine taking little to no resources.. Does not cause any issues on the servers i have it running on, and does not inter-fear with my movies or games on my desktop

Just thought I would pass on some peace of mind about the software..

So a buddy of mine has the Sprint Hero (Android OS) loaded with the latest Sprint update which is Android OS 2.1 at the time of writing this.. I have the Verizon Eris Rooted with Android OS 2.1.. So 2 different phones.. 2 Different carriers.. 2 different Roms - 1 is over the air updated from Carrier, other is Rooted rom from the Internet.

My buddy was going to check out a website on his phone (url wont be disclosed) when he opened up the default “Internet” app and cleared out the address bar and typed “http://www.re” with no quotes, the auto complete came up as http://www.redtube.com this is not a site he has ever been too on his phone.. To confirm this wasn’t just by chance I grabbed my phone and attempted to recreate the issue.. it did the same thing on mine..

The above picture is of my phone please note the following.. I have never put that url into my phone before.. the restockit urls are from my history cache.. redtube came up even above my phones history cache..

So Google.com Promotes RedTube?  For anyone that does not know.. RedTube is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!! My buddy would have gotten in trouble if someone else at work was looking over his shoulder and saw that popup..

Apple’s iPad, released Saturday, has been scrutinized by hundreds of reviewers, disassembled by iFixIt and others, and fiscally analyzed by Wall Street, but it wasn’t until Monday that the most pressing question about the “magical and revolutionary” device was answered.

That question, of course, is: Will it blend?

Tens of millions of YouTubers have watched Blendtec’s deadpan blendologist Tom Dickson over the years as he has popped a series of devices and ingredients into his company’s voracious Total Blender to answer that pressing question.

Into the maw of that industrial-strength yet designed-for-the-home machine have gone, among many other things, an iPhone, a half-dozen Bic lighters, a gaggle of glow sticks, and a can of Coca-Cola along with a rotisserie chicken - which resulted in the tasty smoothie known as a Cochicken.

Today, it was the iPad’s turn. Of course, you fans of the “Will It Blend?” series know well that the mouth of the Total Blender is too small into which to slip an iPad. But worry not, as Dickson has a straightforward methodology for overcoming that obstacle.

You can observe Dickson’s technique, and discover the fate of the fanbois’ delight here

Somewhere in a corner office at Cupertino’s One Infinite Loop, we can only imagine, a certain “CEO of the Decade” is not amused.

(Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/ipad_blend/ )

Vietnam tersely rejected charges from Google that tens of thousands of Vietnamese-speaking PC users around the world were targeted by hackers.

The country’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on Saturday after fielding a question from the press about Google’s blog post, which was published on its online security blog on March 30.

“Such comments are groundless,” said Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nguyen Phuong Nga. “We have on many occasions clearly expounded our view on issues relating to access to and use of information and information technology, including the Internet. Vietnam law puts in place specific regulations against computer virus and malware as well as on information security and confidentiality.”

A Google security official, Neel Mehta, wrote that the company had discovered a type of malicious software that was disguised as Vietnamese keyboard language software. The software was used to spy on the owners of computers and to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks “against blogs containing messages of political dissent.”

“Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” Mehta wrote.

Following up on Google’s research, security vendor McAfee said the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam.

“We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz.

McAfee said the attacks do not appear to be related to Aurora, an extensive hacking network linked to China and outed by Google in January. The company two weeks ago defied Chinese law and stopped censoring its search results in China in protest. Google said that hackers targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists along with intellectual property of at least 20 other companies.

The Vietnamese malware purports to be the VPSKeys driver used to create accent marks in the right locations on Windows machines, according to McAfee. The code is less sophisticated than the malware used in the Aurora attacks, McAfee said.

On Tuesday, computer security researchers released a report on a new cyber-espionage network that once again targeted entities such as the Indian military, the Office of the Dalai Lama and the United Nations.

The Shadow network was traced to Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, where the perpetrators used a variety of social networking tools to control compromised computers. As of Tuesday, China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) said it had not been notified of the report by the researchers.

(Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/193526/vietnam_rebuffs_hacking_claims_from_google.html )

So having several Computer, servers and VirtualMachines running at my house I was wishing there was a way to earn some money with them even if  its pocket change (hey free lunch would be nice right?)

I found GomezPeer which seams to work out well for what I wanted.. you install a Java based client and just let it run while your on your computer. I have been running for about 6months now and made payout (and paid) each month and with 5 computers I make about 5.00-6.00/USD a month.. Neat thing about this is you don’t really need to use the computer a lot, while running it on a computer you use alot seams to be a added benefit it seams to run fine on idle PC’s or rarely used PC’s. You are not limited to how many computer you install too using your single account (they actually encourage installing to more than one computer).

The only issue I have seen with this is people seam to have varried wait times to get their accounts approved.. Once you sign up you need to install the application and let it run. It took just under 2 1/2 weeks for my account to be approved but i have heard of accounts taking upward of 2months for approval.

GomezPeer Zone

So I got alot of complaints about the last layout being hard on the eyes.. Lets see if this one is any better.. Leave comments with feedback if you think anything should be changed or added. I wil still be fine tuning this template for the next week or so im sure..

Just a quickie Review, Saw this baby on DealExtreme I picked up a few of these on ebay a few months back they work great even on newer servers. I use these all the time in my Labs at work.

Great Price on DealExtreme right now $2.59 each free shipping!

The myth that to delete data really securely from a hard disk you have to overwrite it many times, using different patterns, has persisted for decades, despite the fact that even firms specializing in data recovery, openly admit that if a hard disk is overwritten with zeros just once, all of its data is irretrievably lost.

Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest. He and his colleagues ran a scientific study to take a close look at hard disks of various makes and different ages, overwriting their data under controlled conditions and then examining the magnetic surfaces with a magnetic-force microscope. They presented their paper at ICISS 2008 and it has been published by Springer AG in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Shyaam Sundhar R. S.: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy).

They concluded that, after a single overwrite of the data on a drive, whether it be an old 1-gigabyte disk or a current model (at the time of the study), the likelihood of still being able to reconstruct anything is practically zero. Well, OK, not quite: a single bit whose precise location is known can in fact be correctly reconstructed with 56 per cent probability (in one of the quoted examples). To recover a byte, however, correct head positioning would have to be precisely repeated eight times, and the probability of that is only 0.97 per cent. Recovering anything beyond a single byte is even less likely.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the vendors of data-wiping programs offering software that overwrites data up to 35 times, based on decades-old security standards that were developed for diskettes. Although this may give a data wiper the psychological satisfaction of having done a thorough job, it’s a pure waste of time.

Something much more important, from a security point of view, is actually to overwrite all copies of the data that are to be deleted. If a sensitive document has been edited on a PC, overwriting the file is far from sufficient because, during editing, the data have been saved countless times to temporary files, back-ups, shadow copies, swap files … and who knows where else? Really, to ensure that nothing more can be recovered from a hard disk, it has to be overwritten completely, sector by sector. Although this takes time, it costs nothing: the dd command in any Linux distribution will do the job perfectly.

(Original Post )

So I went to Order a LCD Picture frame for a Christmas present.  Found a cheap one on eCost.com and figured while I was getting the frame might as well get an SD card for it as well..  So I do the checkout and everything looks good confirmed that both items were in stock so I could get them quickly.. Few min later I got my email confirmation of my order.. And there was a 3rd Item that was added to the list.. "CAWRA" note this was listed as a line item not down by the tax and subtotals. Called up eCost to ask what that was all about.. The guy that answered was from India and it was nearly impossible to understand anything he was saying, and I’m use to talking to people from India as I deal with people from their daily. He had no Idea what the line item was and had no answers for me, I requested a Cancelation and Refund. About an hour and half later I still didn’t have my email confirmation that the order was canceled. Checked the order status on the site and it was still processing. Called eCost again and got another person from India but this time it was a woman with a clearer voice. Asked her what was up with the order, She immediately was able to tell me that the "CAEWRA" was for the "California  State Recycling Fee" oh ok that makes sense I’m use to seeing that on my receipts from OfficeDepot and BestBuy.. But she couldn’t explain how it moved from the bottom under the subtotal like it shows on the site, to being a line item on the email..  Next issue I noticed that my SD card was on backorder and she confirmed this, and I got mad cus it said it was in stock on the site.. I asked about the order status and she confirmed it was processing normally, I informed her that was supposed to be canceled and she changed it to Canceled. 5min later I got my confirmation email that my order was canceled.

Moral: Dont trust the item status on the site.. Watch line items on your order confirmations.. If you need to cancel an order call More than once to make sure it was canceled. BTW takes 24-72hours to get a refund if your card was already billed.

Since I don’t like my orders being changed around, or having to wait for stuff that’s on backorder after ordering it because it said it was in stock and because I can’t trust that canceled orders will really be canceled.

I will no longer do business with eCost.com