Modern file hosting services (eg rapidshare or megaupload) have more than often utilized various methods to secure and promote their services annoying the regular non-premium user with the most prominent method of limiting downloads per user through IP logging, and then waiting for an upsurd amount of time for the next download.

Now, now not all of you have the time to spend in front of a pc monitor, do ya, and NO don’t start suggesting paying for premium services for EVERY file hosting service out there.

Therefore today i will share with you a nifty trick to use with your favourite download manager jDownloader, to renew your IP directly from Cytanet NetRunner service, and get your downloads as fast as possible.

As only a few of you know, the Cytanet NetRunner service leases the IP for 1 week, BUT it is possible to renew the IP by logging-in the NetRunner service, disconnecting and then reconnecting. This will achieve you a brand new, just out of the box IP.

You can streamline the process by using the direct below, replace the red bold username and password references below with your NetRunner Service credentials, and you will instantly acquire a new IP.
https://netrunner.cytanet.com.cy/cgi-bin/netrunnerlogin.cgi?username=username&password=password&action=initial&Login=Login

Now, in order to use this in your favourite download manager or in a script, you will need to procure a small open-source application called cURL that will execute the above URL and achieve the same result without even opening an Internet Browser.

Execute the following command in the command prompt, et viola, a brand new IP coming right up:
curl -k "https://netrunner.cytanet.com.cy/cgi-bin/netrunnerlogin.cgi?username=username&password=password&action=initial&Login=Login"

Then you can have jDownloader execute this batch command every time it requires a new IP to continue downloading.

PS: make sure to get a flavor of cURL supporting HTTPS and SSL in order to be able to process the link.

That’s all folks.

It’s been rumored for quite some time now, here in Cyprus, but as they say, it ain’t true ’til the fat lady sings, pigs can fly, etc … you catch my drift, but even then it might not happen, cause guess what, we live in CYPRUS.

Seriously now back to the subject, considering the fact that something expected takes forever to materialize, the unreasonable long wait seems to just have shortened, in respect of ADSL speeds in Cyprus…

I am talking about the image below from my B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ which briefly insinuates that CyTA has allocated the folowing bandwidth on my account and i should be getting download speeds of 2368kbps and an upload speed of 448kbps, but i am currently NOT (CyTA seems to restrict the download speed to 1mbit).

I couldn’t really understand why everything was is kept hash-hash, till i had some conversations with people in the market, who made it all crystal clear to me.

Still wandering why Cyprus is still in the stone-age of ADSL speeds when our providers market a 2mbit download speed of as being “Speedy Gonzales”, where the rest of the world moves with 24mbit speeds having 2mbit as a bare minimum.

At first there was GOD only CyTA, providing all ADSL services, *monopoly abuse* but who cared…

As ADSL became more and more widespread, clientele became bigger CyTA did nothing to keep up, thus providing a really lousy service to the clients. Then people began changing internet service providers, -who leased CyTA lines-, promising better services, which somwhat reduced CyTA’s server load. Still nobody cared about CyTA’s *monopoly abuse*.

Then all of a sudden Cyprus became an EU member, and as such all EU member companies have to abide the EU regulations, and now somebody cares about *monopoly abuse* … did anybody ask them to ? come again ?

So, now CyTA has make room for the new market entrants in order to avoid any fines and penalties from the EU. CyTA therefore can NOT currently reduce prices and can NOT offer better services than its competitors, until it loses a major portion of its clientele to its competitors in order to favour fair competition. :dizzy:

In the end the ones in loss is the internet community that may not enjoy speeds and prices comparable to other countries.

Speculators though say, that from September 2008, CyTA clients may enjoy further reductions in prices and better services offered including increased ADSL speeds.

Only time will tell… if my patience doesn’t run out till then…

i sure thought so, until i decided to google for a password checker and rate my passwords. after all, i’m still human and can’t recall more than two passwords at a specific time, probably you fit in the same scheme as well . i hate it that at work i have five different sets of usernames and passwords that i have to use two or three every day just to access “my” personal computer and a couple of others on special occasions.

in any case, for home use i too have two sets of passwords, my standard one (shorter) and a more “secure” password (longer), i thought.

i’ve been using them for so long with out ever considering the strength of the passwords as after all they are a bunch of random key strokes.

now i have decided it’s time to strengthen my security by revising both my passwords, difficult part is remembering all the places i’ve used them

so back to the matter in hand, google has found some good tools in order to test your password strenght. after all there is no patented procedure to test one’s password strength so i decided to run them on all available tools.

to my disappointment and surprise :dizzy: both my passwords were rated weak and medium, with all password checkers, which is really unacceptable for my standards, so this post ends here, you know what i’ll be doing for the time being, and if i don’t post here ever again, you know what that means -better write that new password down somewhere-, *oups*…

below, you can find links to the password checkers i’ve used…

• Microsoft Password Checker
• Password Meter
• Security Stats

more reading at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx where microsoft has put together a really nice article for a change, on how to create passwords, dos and don’ts, etc…

Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is out as of today, 29th April 2008, if you are suspicious of the authenticity of Windows XP Service Pack 3 file posted by 3rd party sites, this is the link for you as it is directly from Microsoft.

Here is the direct link (Right Click -> Save Link As). The file size is 316.43MB (331,805,736 bytes).

The official hashes for the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 posted on TechNet are as follows:

• CRC32: C411A9DA
• MD5: BB25707C919DD835A9D9706B5725AF58
• SHA-1: C81472F7EEEA2ECA421E116CD4C03E2300EBFDE4

You can verify the hashes by using FileVerifier++, it is a freeware.

Installed Windows XP SP3 and everything works normally, at the moment.

Warning: This will be stuck in your head for weeks to come…

MP3 Audio: mahnamahna.mp3 (2,712KB)

As some frequent visitors may have noticed, there have been some changes to the web site lately and I am finally glad to announce that the updates I have been planning to do for a long time, are finally here. :dizzy:

First of all, no, the website design has not changed (probably will not for the time being), but I have made upgrades to the final version of Wordpress as well as adding some new functionality to the Wordpress interface and mainly in regards to commenting posts.

The updates, among others, are:

• Ability to subscribe to comments so that you will get notified by an e-mail message next time there is a new comment or activity to a specific post.
• Ability to quote other posters’ comments in your reply, making clearer to which person/question you refer/reply to.
• Ability to add tags and smilies to your comments by clicking on the desired tag or smilie button above the comment box.
• Ability to print comments in addition to the post with the print post function.

Secondly, I have made necessary updates to the ECI B-FOCuS Router (Router Configuration Manual) post in order to add instructions on how to configure Static LAN IPs for different MAC addresses as well as on how to enable Port Forwarding feature to enhance the functionality of p2p and torrent downloads (for programs such as eMule, Limewire, uTorrent, BitComet, etc).

In these modern times an email address identifies an individual, just as his/her name, residence address or any other personal information would, which this information is protected by privacy laws all over the globe. These laws are violated daily, through unsolicited email (spam) sent by individuals or companies to advertise their products or services.

Chain Letters
Any email that you receive daily in your inbox forwarded from friends, colleagues and associates containing any content ranging from jokes, pictures, funny videos, prayers, wishes, to complaints and protests for certain events that happened long in the past, can be categorized as a chain letter these days, as it is forwarded from one machine to another on a daily basis, as if it was a plague.

It is also very annoying to receive an email ten pages long containing a two-line message at the very end after all the forward details of previous senders or even worse in the middle of the email content (if signatures are taken into account) to figure out the contents of a questionable attachment file.

As some emails state in their content; of course the emails can be tracked down, considering the tons of forwarded email addresses returning to the original sender, but what if the original sender is not the one claiming to be? “The easiest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” -taken from my favorite movie “Usual Suspects”.

Unsolicited Emails
Now lets flip the coin to examine how spam is involved in all this.
Consider the above example, containing forwarded details of ten (10) senders that could easily accumulate upto a hundred (100) recipient email addresses of other individuals not even in your contact list. Of course there is no bad intention in forwarding other people’s email addresses along with the email message body, as after all the email is sent from trusted sources to trusted destinations, but this is still a violation of their privacy.

In any case, now imagine this email being received by the above said individuals or companies that want to promote their products or services. They will not hesitate one second to add all those tons of email addresses in their bot and engage the attack by sending you unsolicited emails, forever.
Because you might think this situation is far fetched, as there are no trust issues between senders and recipients, as said above, consider the same email being received, or opened on an infected machine, the consequences could be the same or even worse! (as we all know, not everyone is capable of maintaining their machines in top shape, in regard of external threats, such as viruses, trojans etc)

It is well known that spammers employ various techniques -such as website/email filtering and machine scanning- for collecting victims email addresses for sending unsolicited emails, one could as well be chain letters.

Solution
To conclude, if you still want to forward an email (chain letter) to a considerable number of contacts please…

Before forwarding an email asking your contacts to sign-up their name or email to support a cause, make sure that the complaint, protest, petition, is actually a current issue (making a web search), unless you want to irritate them. Outdated emails for a specific cause that have lapsed, become spam by themselves.

Now the actual procedure of forwarding a chain letter:

• First, strip-off the message body from all previously forwarded email addresses, to ensure the privacy of the previous recipients
• Use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field instead of TO field, that all good email clients have -but nobody appreciates its use- to ensure the privacy of the forward recipients

This way emails get sent individually and no recipient knows each other recipients’ email addresses.

Please encourage your contacts to act the same way!

CyTA has recently (October 2006) began distributing a new modem/router device, the Alcatel Thompson SpeedTouch 585, that succeeds the older and never supported ECI B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ device. After the unsuccessful era of the Israeli devices, CyTA finally returns to the older and more trustworthy brand, Alcatel. Fortunately Alcatel is a well known brand with at least better support for its products compared to ECI, given that firmware updates float all over the web, and that counts for something.

It seems that CyTA is actively trying to subcontract the most-difficult-to-configure devices and does not even give the chance or technical knowledge to customers to configure the device for their own needs. It comes preconfigured to your residence or office and I am still wondering if CyTA technicians are capable or have the technical knowhow of configuring the device, or any other device of such matter. In any case this time CyTA actually bothered to setup passwords for accessing the router configuration interface to ensure that customers cannot mess with it (this pisses me so much), but I guess it is for the best for the not-so-technologically-literate-users-who-like-to-mess-up-every-device-that-floats-around.

But the struggle goes on…

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I was just being explained this mathematical approach of proving the final statement below (don’t check now), and I thought it deserved to be posted here. This approach has (supposedly, no proof found yet…) been developed by Harvard students.
Of course no pan intended for the fairer sex… (although I believe that the proof is valid )

It is true that in todays time to find and maintain a woman, a man must dedicate time and money,

woman = time x money

Economics professor Ian Walker, of central England’s Warwick University has recently (2002) formulated an equation and found that time actually is money. His formula is a bit more complicated for our taste, so we use the simplest form of the saying “time is money” as shown below.

time = money

Therefore, substituting time with money we get,

woman = money x money

Simplifying the equation…

woman = money²

It is a common saying that “money is the root of all evil.” According to the Random House Dictionary of Proverbs and Sayings, the phrase first appeared in English circa 1000 A.D. The saying originated in the New Testament. “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Timothy, 6:10.
In our case we substitute evil with problems (no need to be bad, heh)

money = problems

Therefore, substituting money to the original equation we have…

woman = (√problems)²

Simplifying the equation by canceling out the root (√) and the square (²) signs we get…

woman = problems

So the moral fiber of the above is, “Why should a man waste time and money to end up in trouble ?“

I recently got a hold on of a B-FOCuS MultiPort 342+ router and later exchanged it with a new B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ router, as an upgrade from my ISP. Unfortunately no configuration manual was supplied by the ISP in either case, so the NET was the only source of enlightment on how to configure the router to my needs.

To my total disappointment I was unable to find anything for a long time. Imagine my frustration when some links found in various forums and blogs were dead, unsupported or even in foreign languages I couldn’t read or translate. Fortunately enough using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine I was able to get a hold on to the configuration manual of a similar ECI product B-FOCuS 270/285/400PR in hope the firmware was similar enough to help me configure my router. Once again my efforts were in vein. The firmware of the two products was different in all aspects.

Later on I found the confiuration manual of the actual product but in hebrew transaltion. The illustrations provided though served as a good guidance in obtaining the required knowledge as the firmware was practically the same.

After all this ordeal I decided to write a small router configuration manual explaining how I configured the individual device to serve as a router, wireless access point, UPnP devce, etc…

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