project prey website link

Its called “PREY” and its free. I came across Prey a while back, when I was still using my windows laptop, and although I never got my laptop lost or stolen, I tested it several times with help of some friends and I got to say It works extremely good.

I can’t see any reason why this shouldn’t be instaled on your computer, since It’s free and its asleep until remotely triggerd, then it can provide you with the computer’s location and a big number of other features like sending a message to the computer or even receive a photogaph of the person using it. And since it sits so silently in your computer, a thief will not be suspicious that his actions are being watched. But, as always, keep in mind that just like Apple’s solution it only works when the device is on and connected to the net. But hey, what do you got to lose, right?

So head on to Prey website and install it right now.

According to both wikipedia and w3schools the IE is still the most widely used web browser with about 35% share, followd by Google Chrome with 26%, but the latest version IE9 only has about 5% of the with IE8 still being the most used with 10% share.

The question is, will IE10 realy beat the other browsers?

It is going to have a bad time because both chrome and firefox are pretty fast and becoming better every day!

What’s your favourit web browser?

Apple | iCloud | Find My Mac

For everyone that has a gadget from the One Infinite Loop company, there is a great solution named “Find my iphone”, for everyonel else I will review another software in a few days that’s compatible with almost all devices.

This was available since “mobile me” and now with “iCloud” it is even better, its free, works flawlessly with great precision through all you iOS devices. But The best part is that now it’s also available for your hardly earned MacBook as long as you’re running OS Lion.

Setting it up is very straight forward. On your iOS devices simply go to your Mail Settings chose “New” chose “iCloud” and fill with your iCloud ID and password. When you’re done tap “Next”, activate “Find my iPhone” and your done! Keep in mind that the service only works when your iphone’s location system is on.

On your Mac under “System Prefrences” chose “iCloud” and login with your @me ID then check the “Find my Mac” option and you’re good to go.

Now just head on to iCloud.com/find and you can locate all of your devices. You can send an instant message with sound, lock it or even wipe all content remotely from any browser on mac or “Find my iphone” app on iOS. But remember that once you wiped it, you can’t track it anymore and it’s gone forever.

This is no fool-proof feature, if the device is turned off it doesn’t work, especially if the thief fully wipes the device. But its good to know that Companies are starting to care. Perhaps in a near future these features might come integrated in a Hardware-level rendering almost all stolen computers useless, thus discouraging theft.

Google Android Market / Wifi Analyzer

How to geek review of Wifi Analyzer

You can get it from the Android Market or iOS version in the Cydia store.

Mint VIN code crack

Mint posted another awsome article that teaches you to verify if a given VIN is a fake.

Have you ever looked at your car’s VIN code? It’s a 17-digit collection of letters and digits that, on the surface of it, is completely random and incomprehensible. But the truth is, each car’s VIN number carries a wealth of information, from where the vehicle was manufactured to its weight, chassis type, series and even engine. In fact, by doing some fairly straightforward math (admittedly, you’ll need pen and paper for it), you can confirm whether a VIN is valid — or fake — by following the steps outlined in this infographic.

Now worry no more when you’re about to buy a used car!

Mint blog by Jess

There’s hardly a more prominent financial product in America today than the almighty credit card. Nearly everybody has at least one — almost 80% of consumers in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston — and many use it on a daily basis. Without a doubt, there are also those consumers who know their credit card numbers by heart (makes online shopping and booking travel so much easier, if anything). But how many of you know what those numbers really mean? Contrary to what you may think, they aren’t random. Those 16 digits are there for a reason and, knowing a few simple rules, you could actually learn a lot about a credit card just from its number. This infographic shows you how to crack that code.

Federal Reserve BankBut according to the same source, after one year the trend is changing. Now it appears that Debit Cards are growing fast as Credit Cards are declining.

In a near future we’ll probably se an increase in the use of new payment methods such as eBanking PayPal or even NFC wallet.

What’s your favourite payment method?

Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron

The technique electromagnetically induces transparency in Iron isotopes and can be applied in other opaque materials. According to research published in Nature magazine this technique allows control over both transmition and speed of the photons. This can be acheived with an intense laser with specific frequency which makes the material invisible to another light frequency, for example invisible to X-Ray.

leader investigator Ralf Rohlsberger explains: 

Certainly there is still a long way to go until the first light quantum computer becomes reality, however this discovery has already led to a series of new experiments in quantum optics with high sensitivity.

Quantum computers will be a leap in computing power, to bad we won’t be seeing one any time soon.

Example of wolfram Alpha

Today, Wolfram anounced the biggest single step in the development of Wolfram|Alpha and it is called WolframAlpha|Pro. Unlike Alpha it is not free, but if you take advantage of its capabilities it is very cheap. For $4.99/month or $2.99/month for students, the Alpha|Pro supports uploading data processing it and re downloading it.

Wolfram Alpha Pro | general analysis of a pure binary fileAn example of this is to upload an image and apply filters to it and download the output. Same can be done with a spreadsheet or even a sound file. You can also give an input like “sin (xy)” and download the 3D plot as a CDF (Computable Document Format) that can be manipulated in many other programs

You can also upload a binary file and it analysis it. Another feature is Dates and curency

Wolfram Alpha Pro FeaturesIt is customizable and keeps track, for instance of the mesure units you use for future uses, and also supports bookmarks. 

Wolfram is giving a 14 day free trial with no payment request. I fully recommend you to give it a try!

FBI Conference of anonymous in Anonymous’s hands

Place: Internet

Weather: Electric

Anonymous are on FBI’s scope, still, these Hacktivists started taunting authorities even harder. Anonymouse released an internal FBI conference call with UK Metropolitan Police. In it an agent of the UK MP shares status updates on their investigations. Aperantly they are intentionally trying to delay the court cases against Ryan Cleary and Jake “Topiary” Davis, two hackers connected to Lulzsec arested last year as a favor to the FBI’s New York field office. The goal is to delay at least 6 weeks and idealy 8 for some unspecified action by the Bureau.

In another investigation in West Midlands about a hacker who goes by “tehwongz” is also mentioned. The hacker tourned out to be a 15 year old “who’s doing this all for attention and [is] a bit of an idiot,” he’s a “pain in the bum” and a “wannabe type character”. The teen Published his resume and linked his twitter account.

And.. Of course.. Hacking:

I am known mainly for this, my hacking portfolio includes Steam (which, when I was pissed with Omni (the owner of this site) I used to hit this site offline for a good few hours.

I have also hacked Police websites, released an SQLi on police.uk - Hacked 2 Stock Exchanes, Defaced 2 Banks, DDoS’d MasterCard, Paypal & multiple Gov sites, Defaced hundreds of Websites and given out gifts, Christmas presents, domain names etc for “LulzXmas” worth over $100.000 to shelters, charities, twitter followers & random people.

The cat and mouse game goes on. Authorities are very determined to catch these hacktivists.

Mark Twain’s 176th Birthday

Some are more detailed and creative than others like (May 21, 2010) PAC-MAN’s 30th anniversary was playable for 2 days “because its to cool to keep just for one day”, just press “Insert Coin” button and you start playing the 8bit era game.  Taking Wolfram|Alpha data,

$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3-2 times bigger than pay rate) Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day).

But the one I find most interesting is the Les Paul’s 96th Birthday doodle. Where you can play guitar using your keyboard’s keys. Try it yourself I’ll leave you a few examples.

Godfather: dhkjhkhjhfgd

titanic: tyyuiuytyoiutew

Star Wars: 2543285432854342

Imperial March: 444153153.

Dary, Legendary!

ACTA protest using Anonymous mask

But really how bad is ACTA? The video made by anonymous showes extreme possibilities. Much of ACTA has changed since. ars technica has a full article about what media tell about ACTA’s impact and what it really states.

We at Geek Spot fully support those who protest against any kind of censorship like ACTA or PIPA/SOPA or even the newer Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). All of this agreements have been negociated in secret by organizations like MPAA or RIAA. This would give this organizations powers to dictate prices and severely punish thoso who wouldn’t do as they say. You know things are expensive when a video game costs about 10% of the averige European salary. I am not defending piracy here, but a google search will name a few autors that state piracy, in some cases is free publicity. Stoping piracy would not make people buy more originals, as seen by the use of French laws. Lastly, Jammie Thomas case lasted for 5 years and states the following exagerated and ridiculously different penalties:

• $222,000 against Thomas-Rasset in 2007 ($9,250 per song)
• $1.92 million against Thomas-Rasset in her 2009 retrial ($80,000 per song)
• $1.5 million today ($62,500 per song)

It seem that RIAA gets this values randomly. It is also know that RIAA and other organizations likewise calculate prejudice values as if every illegally downloaded track would be sold if there was no piracy and this is way insubstantial.

Anonymous is a group that started activities in 2003 and due to its nature (anonymous identity) there is no known leadership, and membership is self-signed as if "anonymous" was a colective person representing the internet. Members comunicate by IRC chanels.

This is probably their biggest (known) attack yet. It was a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service). This type of attack must be very well timed, and works by using a LOIC (what is Low Orbit Ion Cannon?) that works by overloading a server with requests and thus denying service.  The attackers using LOIC can usa a "Hivemind" feature that allows someone on an online communication service to direct your PC's LOIC attack on its target. This gives them the volume of traffic it needs to overload and take down the target.

Steve J. from ZDnet stated as follows:

Someone, perhaps Anonymous, but there’s no proof of their responsibility, has been spamming a message about Anonymous and/or Megaupload and a link to a Web site on Twitter and IRC rooms. If you click on the link you’ll find that you’ve opened a Web browser window to a site that invites you to “Join the hive!” It’s not actually asking you to join the attack though. Once you’ve on the page, your PC will be used in the DDoS attack. So long as you’re on the page, your Web browser will continue to hammer the selected target site. When I tried it, the DoJ site was being attacked.

Megaupload was taken down because its employees including its CEO Kim DOTCOM allegedly were aware and monetarily encouraging piracy through a member affiliation program, stats the indictment.

“For much of its operation, the Mega Conspiracy has offered an “Uploader Rewards” Program, which promised premium subscribers transfers of cash and other financial incentives to upload popular works, including copyrighted works, to computer servers under the Mega Conspiracy’s direct control and for the Conspiracy’s ultimate financial benefit…. In total, the Mega Conspiracy directly paid uploaders millions of dollars through online payments.”

Gizmodo states that it was targeted in the first place due to its size: 

There are plenty of players in the no-questions-asked online storage game: HulkShare, MediaFire, YouSendIt. They’re all staples of web sharing—and they’re all still up and running today. Partly because they’re smaller than Megaupload; partly because they’re smarter, but mostly because they don’t operate like sloppy drug kingpins.

Being the 14th biggest online website with 50 milion visits per day and representing about 4% of the Internet traffic, MPAA and RIAA painted a big bullseye on its head. 

Besids this allegations, Megaupload claimed to take down unauthorized content when notified by shareholders It has created an "abuse tool" and even negociated with companies like Universal Music Group about licensing content. PayPal also stated that DOTCOM  sent a curious email in 2011:

Our legal team in the US is currently preparing to sue some of our competitors and expose their criminal activity. We like to give you a heads up and advice [sic] you not to work with sites that are known to pay up loaders for pirated content. They are damaging the image and the existence of the file hosting industry (see what's happening with the Protect IP Act). Look at Fileserve.com, Videobb.com, Filesonic.com, Wupload.com, Uploadstation.com. These sites pay everyone (no matter if the files are pirated or not) and have NO repeat infringer policy. And they are using PayPal to pay infringers.

It's also known that FBI holdes copies of emails sent inside megaupload where some employees trade links do download illegal content, and in one email dotcom allows to increase the number of flaged links to be taken down from 2500/day to 5000/day due to the company's big profit.

Some even state this "Mega Conspiracy" is due to PIPA/SOPA:

“My sources tell me the timing of the Megaupload arrests was no accident. The federal government, they say, was spoiling for a fight after the apparent defeat of SOPA/PIPA and not a little humiliation at the hands of the Web. And what better way to bolster the cause for cyber-crackdown than by pointing to a massive display of cyber-terrorism at the hands of everyone’s favorite Internet boogeyman: Anonymous?”

The fact is this week has been the week of copyright warfare.

What's your oppinion on the matter?

If your ISP provides you with a let's say DSL connection of 10Mbit/s and your downloads reach speeds between 1MB/s and 1.25MB/s than you're using every bit of your connection since in networking the standard mesure unit is the bit instead of byte, and torrent clients usually mesure in Bytes. So if you want to know your connection speed you can test at speedtest and compare it to the Mbps your ISP offers you. In case you want to convert bits to bytes keep in mind that 1 byte equals 8 bits and, 1 bit equals 0.125 bytes.

But if your internet connection is wey below the speeds your ISP claims you have, well as you probably know there can be a big number of things slowing you down. First of all is your distance from the ISP is very important, the further you are, the slower it will be. Secondly your type of connection, DSL/Cable connection will suffer more from distance than an optical fiber one. 

You should consider all the above and contact your ISP if necessary and ultimately either change to another ISP or downgrade to a cheaper plan with claimed speeds you can actually reach.

If you can reach you speeds at speedtest at anytime and the moment you open a specific service like skype, WoW or your bit torrent client your speed drops to an unbearable state, than your ISP might be shaping your traffic. If your ISP appears Here than its a bad sign. You can also use Glasnost to test if your ISP is shaping your traffic. 

Is there a way around? 

ISP use Deep Packet Inspection engines to monitor the incoming traffic. Packet Inspection is used to decide if the packet can pass or if it needs to be routed to a different destination. PI recognizes everything from spam or virus to packet types delaying or filtering your P2P traffic. 

There are a number of ways around, like using a VPN to encrypt your traffic or changing your default port number to reduce or hide your transfers but keep in mind that none is guaranteed to work, the Wired How to Wiki details several ways to try to get around ISP traffic shaping.