Go ahead, click it.

Google’s web history tracks your searches history and allows you to view it at any time in the future. It gives you a choice to delete certain searches, it also gives your mom, the police, and hackers an ability to explore this diary. Whether they use it for blackmail or prosecution, its not good for YOU.

So what gives with it being enabled by default on all new Google accounts (even non-gmail accounts)? This should really be something you opt-in to.

Rest assured, there is a way to remove this feature. Head over to your Google account’s center and click edit services and then  click this magic link. There you go, that wasn’t so hard.

Here go the details:

Spindex is a silverlight app which aggregates your social profiles, twitter and facebook for the time being, in one place. The additional (not yet functional) feature of RSS feeds makes it somewhat of a mashup between Google Reader and (a non-centralized) Google Buzz. You can post updates to an individual account or to accounts at once. You can filter by name or keyword across multiple networks: want to know about the oil spill? Filter it, see what RSS News are saying, see what public tweets are saying, see what your facebook friends are saying – Spindex centralizes all this information into one spot. It’s a different way to view information.

So, without further speculation, here come the screenshots and their explanation.

You are first greeted with a quaint login screen	After loging in with your live id you are presented with your unconfigured account
Setting Up Spindex Accounts	This is how your default stream looks. Note that twitter updates are more frequent and take up the default page.
This is Spinded facebook page. You can comment, but if you wanna see pictures you still have to go to facebook.	When you click on a name in facebook (individual or page) you are taken to their news stream, and on the right are top Bing search results for the preson, or page, selected.
You can update facebook and twitter status through spindex. See screenshot for further explanation.	And this is the Spindex tab, which currently does not show anything.

Some functions of Spindex are not yet functional, such as it’s RSS reader and the Spindex tab. If RSS tab functions anything like twitter/facebook it will be a very convenient way to see news, taking a jab at Google Reader and desktop clients like RSSOwl. Likewise what Spindex suggests is a future where clients (think IE, Firefox) will be the main way of interfacing with services like facebook or twitter (think http://), whether it be on the desktop or on your mobile phone.

Another thing I should point out: Spindex completely relies on Ging, and people using Spindex will be nudged into switching to Bing. The app itself may be nothing more than a way of getting users hooked on Bing and delivering personalized adds by the information it collects from your activity. But I don’t know, this is just speculation, if you have thoughts SPEAK UP.

What you will need to do is find the corporate (optional: and personal) mailboxes of head people at the said company, The Consumerist runs a fairly decent directory.

Now that you have the emails of these people head over to gmail and login:

1. Click on settings in the top right
2. Click on filters tab
3. Click create new
4. In the from field enter the email address of the spammer (ie: news@acclaim.net)
5. Click Next
6. Check Skip the Inbox, Delete it
7. Check Forward To and enter the email address(es) you earlier acquired (ie: MMackin@acclaim.net)

Great Success! Now every single piece of spam that used to annoy you will no longer show in your mailbox, and maybe it will even get past the spam filter of the villain you are forwarding it to.

I will go ahead and point to the obvious; if you want an unclogged network do not force iPhone users to stick with it. You can’t have two things at once, pick priorities; though it seems AT&T intends to nibble what it cannot eat, and keep it on a 2 year contract of sub-par service and coverage.

Operation Chokehold, purpose and reasoning: Proposed by Dan Lyons Operation Chokehold will attempt to take down, or at least cripple, the AT&T data network. Keep in mind, voice services will remain operational, so the 70-something percent of cell phone users AT&T owns will remain able to make calls.

On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time (GTM -8), we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every smartphone user turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. The idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Some things to keep in mind:

• Remember to turn OFF your Wi-Fi during that hour. There would be NO point browsing YouTube in the office or home and using your Wi-Fi without knowing.
• If you have enough upstream bandwidth at home try using Orb or AirVideo or a similar app to stream a movie for an hour. If not, try MediaFly which will let you download mostly the same video podcasts as your iTunes app without a 10mb limit.

More sources of discussion on the subject may be found at neowin, fakestevejobs, Gizmodo. I will keep this page updated with latest developments.

If you signed up for YouTube prior to Google’s acquisition you may be displeased to see that you are no longer allowed to use your YouTube account independent of your email. The change merges your YouTube account with whatever email was associated with it at the time.

The qualifying conditions are as follows:

• You’ve signed up for their original YouTube account before May 2009.
• You’ve joined your YouTube and Google Accounts together.
• You’re still signing in with your original YouTube password.

It has long been apparent that YouTube is not generating anywhere near its $1.6 billion price, with additional server and employee upkeep costs.

Apparently Google figures they can make money by linking your email with your YouTube habits, and, dare I say, build a psychological profile. Maybe it will have something to do with the ads in Gmail, or the suggested videos on YouTube; or maybe Google plans to take over the world.

Stay tuned for further developments on the situation.

• Google FAQ

This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.

The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.

The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.

In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.

DHT and PEX working in utorrent

DHT

Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.

DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.

Peer Exchange (”PEX”)

Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.

Magnet links

Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.

Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.

It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (”base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.

Compatible Clients

All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.

We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.

This article was originally published on TorrentFreak by a contribution from user Adapa
via LifeHacker

Check the original post for further information:

http://www.modernwarfare2.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=181646

Microsoft Security Essentials is Microsoft’s leap into the Anti-Virus market. The suite aims at tackling viruses, trojans, worms, and malware. It is surprisingly light on resources (unlike a certain Windows-Defender) and has features to match its competitors.

This is the first week that Essentials has been out of beta, and the MS Malware Protection Center has released some interesting statistics.

Analyzing the data – drawing conclusions, forming predictions:

On the right is the Operating System distribution of MSE. Not surprisingly the Windows 7 group holds almost half of the total users. The same people who download a beta OS will be all the more likely to try out a beta product from the same vendor, coupled with the initial limited availability of Windows 7 compatible AVs and the inherent bugs that coincide with early releases/adoption, MSE appeals to users as it was created with Windows 7 in mind.

The Windows XP category, unlike Windows 7, is a melting pot of pros and noobs. On one side you have professionals who, due to staying informed, have bypassed upgrading to Vista and did yet make the move to Windows 7. The other side is the completely clueless users who had their computer set up by the ‘computer guy’ – these users are the largest source of infections and controlled botnets. It is this fraction of WinXP users who are responsible for the majority of total infections. The last group of Windows Vista are the outcasts, generally users who purchased a PC with Vista bundled, very few willfully upgraded from XP. Many of these users have the same technical knowledge as the noobs from XP, but they are protected from themselves through Vista’s utterly annoying, but apparently helpful, UAC restrictions. UAC, coupled with an updated Internet Explorer, will have a somewhat significant effect on protecting Vista users when compared to XP.

How it breaks down:

As I mentioned earlier, Windows XP would be responsible for the majority of infections. There was no requirement to look at the statistics to make that statement. Windows XP users with MSE who were not professionals are a very vulnerable group:

-Had their AV installed by someone else
-Do not care enough to install an AV
-Do not know to install an AV

These few factors raise red flags; as can be sufficiently gathered from world of politics and media, ignorance does not yield positive results.

The specific issue of ignorance is the main reason for the drastic difference of infection distribution per OS. How could an OS with 44% population dominance have only 16% of infections? How can 1/3rd of the sample population report over 50% of infections?

Future Problems:

The responsibility of protecting the computer is shifted from the user back to the computer. The threat? It’s not the virus, the trojan, not even the worm which infect an unpatched pc in 20 minutes – it is the user! The user unwittingly propagates the botnet, spreads viruses and trojans. This is not something easy to fix, there is no money in educating these users, but there is in exploiting them.

Whether you are looking for an alternative to PG2 because it fails to function properly, or simply looking to cut down the number of processes you are running – the information here is for you.

It is possible to block ip-ranges with utorrent’s built in ipfiltering system.

First and foremost, you will need the latest utorrent beta. Be sure to check this out if you are noticing degraded download speeds running utorrent in Windows 7. After you finalize your utorrent install, get a blocklist: a good place to get this is at BISS – get nipfilter.dat.gz, open with an archiver and extract the “ipfilter.dat” to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent or its XP equivalent of C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\uTorrent .

A simple way of reaching the utorrent application folder, regardless of the OS, is by typing ‘%appdata%/utorrent’ in the run menu, without the quotes.

Right click > peer traffic logging > Log Blocked Connections in your Logger tab to see it in effect.

After getting windows 7 I noticed that my downloads of the Linux kernel through utorrent were running at incredibly slow speeds.

Though the reasons behind this may be complicated, the solution turned out to be rather simple.

The first solution is direct, and very simple. You need to disable UPnP port mapping in the settings of utorrent, and run it in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2. For the uninitiated: right click properties of utorrent shortcut, head to compatibility, and make it look like the picture.

Now the second, optional, part will require patching of your tcpip.sys. As you may, or may not, be aware Microsoft introduced a half-open connection limit in XP SP2, and included it in Vista and Win7. As far as the official reason, it was done to hinder the speed at which certain trojans and viruses spread. The real result: slower torrent speeds.

This is very simple. Head over to http://half-open.com/home_en.htm and grab the Half-open limit fix 4.0. Patch it to whatever you need, and restart.

You may also unlock utorrent’s max connections; head over to preferences, Advanced, and find the string net.max_halfopen and increase the numerical value.