Tuesday, August 14, 2012

With 100mbps downstream and 50up, I feel like a more integral part of the internet. Of course, these results can only be gotten when connecting within the country, and through wire. When you make the switch to wireless, the speeds drop dramatically, even more so when you're not within the same room.

After a lot of tinkering, I finally managed to get my wireless connection speed to something decent in my room. (as the wireless router is outside in the hall). Achieving a connection speed of between 40~58mbps. Of course, due to all the overhead and extra bullshit too long to be explained, the actual internet speed is only about 12~18mbps.

Now, Mb/s stands for megabits per second, the speeds you see when downloading files is MB/s which stands for megabytes per second. The upper or lower case is very important, as 8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte.

Now, you might be wondering, why the hell do people use megabits since most of the things around us are written as megabytes. Well, that's partly due to the evolution of operating systems and how they count the data, and some marketing bull-shittery.

Okay let me explain a little about bits.

You know that a computer works using binary coding right? Which means that it operates based on 0s and 1s. For example, 1010 = 10, 1100 = 12, 110001100 = 198. Each digit is a single bit that is either a 1 or 0. There is a lot of fascinating things about it so read up on it if you're' interested.

1 Megabit, refers to 1 million bits. Which means that if you have a 10mbps connection, your network is actually capable of transferring 10MILLION ZEROs OR ONEs PER SECOND. Per second, can you even imagine how blistering fast that is?

Technology is amazing and that's why I love it.

Now for some ranting and relatively geeky section.
I can't believe how anal Starhub is with their routers. I wasn't able to connect my own and access the internet easily. Which was no problem if the wireless router they provided wasn't so unnecessarily lousy. I'm just a room away and the connection was basically shit.

My own routers for some reason couldn't take a private IP address as it's WAN address without fucking up it's wireless radios and giving me errors the entire time.

I didn't feel like using an old router with such a new network (even though it's running DD-WRT), after some research I finally decided to flash my new TP-LINK WDR4300 with OpenWRT. Which worked pretty flawlessly. That router is now running a custom version of Linux, which says a lot about how much customizability is given to it. The wireless is now running smoothly and internet is functioning well as well.

Unfortunately not all is well as most of the things are manual, using CLI more often that I would prefer. Even so, the amount of freedom with a good software is limitless. I shall be experimenting like crazy as much as I could.

Exams are starting next week. Oh well. 

Labels: amazing, awesome, fiber networks, geek, historical, internet, life, like a boss, lordofgeeks, show off, speedtest

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Thursday, April 05, 2012

I really need to write more geeky stuffs. The nature of my blog has defied the laws of.. blogs. Okay I didn't really plan the starting very well.

Not the point.

The point is, this shall be a very geeky post, but dumb-ed down for mere mortals to attempt. Sounds great eh?


These 2 services will change your life.
1. Evernote
2. Box.net

If you already know how to use all of them, then there really isn't any point in reading this. Unless there are some thing you never knew you could do with it!

Alright, so what do I mean by flying?
This is how you could take all your data into the internet. Poof! Like magic, your data will always be available no matter which device you're using.

Why am I doing this all of a sudden?
Because the devices we're carrying increases in power exponentially, but we're not making full use of it. Especially your smart phone, it's one hell of a powerful device, I swear.

Fly~

Read more »

Labels: box.net, cloud, evernote, geek, guide, internet, lordofgeeks, rant, tips

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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Now, here's some things to bring out the fear in you.



Watch it. It explains everything you need to know about how YOU are screwed.

Now, about PIPA and SOPA. Both of them has been paused indefinitely. Which means that in a way, the internet won. But it doesn't mean that the bill is gone, or deleted. It merely means that this is a temporary peace while they find another way to fuck with us.

I realized that I didn't do a good job of explaining it well the other time. Anonymous did a good job at it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeEcoi8kEuU

It's just a video of them speaking, of course, they provided the transcript. Here.

The SOPA act essentually means, that even if you make a video of your child playing or singing and you have music playing in the background, or video on TV, you are breaking the law, and the government will order the websites that host your content to censor your content because of their new bill. Or if you visit websites that are on servers not in the United States you will be blocked so that you cannot access them. 

Ask yourselves, Who really owns the internet? 

The answer is simple: no one actually owns the Internet, and no single person, organization or government controls the Internet in its entirety. It is more of a concept than an actual tangible entity, and the Internet relies on a physical infrastructure that connects networks to other networks. There are many organizations, corporations, governments, schools, private citizens and service providers that all own pieces of the infrastructure that make up the internet, but there is no one entity that owns it all. How can the US government decide to block access to parts of the internet that the US government does not even own? The SOPA act is a direct violation to people's right to freedom of knowlege and information, And for that violation the United States government is a disgrace to the land of the free, The free that every United States soldier has fought or died for. The United States government is essentually telling the people of the United States that they are free to do as the government tells them. If people do not follow their rules they will arrest them for making an attempt to learn. But the government will tell the media that these people are getting arrested for acts of treason, domestic terrorism, or internet piracy.  

As for the United States government. Who gave you the right to regulate the people's right to think outside the box and use the internet as they see fit? If we cut off global internet, shouldn't we also cut off all foreign affairs? Should we hinder globalization completely? Perhaps all other World Trade Centers are acts of terrorism by existing, as they use the Internet for commerce. The ambiguity of this bill should terrify you.

Now that ACTA has been passed, it means that your ISP (internet service provider) can now legally spy on all your data. EVERYTHING you do, is potentially monitored. So don't think that all the downloads that you've been getting are getting pass unnoticed.

You know, it's been quite long since I'm this quite fired up as a geek. This is ridiculous. Simply ridiculous.

Thankfully, I have been taking measures against such things for the longest time. I may have slacked off a little, but I did what I could without knowing all this bullshit.

From now onwards, I shall start writing about how you can protect yourself online, against threats like this. How you can stay safe online, remain as anonymous as possible, and avoid getting screwed ten times over.

I hate this shit. Honestly, fuck this shit.
My minions, the legal governments has declared war upon the internet, remain aware, and stay safe.

Labels: ACTA, anonymous, featured, geek, internet, lordofgeeks, megaupload, must read, PIPA, screwed, SOPA

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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Now they've been around for a pretty long time, but the recent news about SOPA, PIPA, Megaupload, and that they took down a few government websites is creating an uproar on the internet.

If you didn't know yet, the FBI took down Megaupload 2 days ago for various obvious reasons. Here's anonymous' response to it. (and their official statement)

http://pastebin.com/WEydcBVV


They took down 14 websites

justice.gov
universalmusic.com
riaa.org
mpaa.org
copyright.gov
hadopi.fr
wmg.com
usdoj.gov
bmi.com
fbi.gov
Anti-piracy.be/nl/
ChrisDodd.com
Vivendi.fr
Whitehouse.gov

Well. Let me talk about why their existence is important first. They exist not as a group of selected people, but as an idea. The scary thing about an idea, is that, when many people have the same one, they can put it into action.

Here's the way they work. Something happens, someone voice out their opinions online. Others who join the channel discuss about it. They think about whether it's important to voice it out or not. If important, they will coordinate online and attack specific targets.

It's important because they're the voice on the internet. With enough presence to not get masked up by the other news. When they make a statement, they make it loud and bold, and they're like the freedom fighters on the net.

Now that's all well and good, but their attacks are generally pointless from a technical standpoint. Yes, it's amazing that they are able to coordinate so many computers to DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) a website, it takes considerable skill to write out a program to do that. (what's more in this most recent attack, it's automatic. I shall not talk about the ethics for this post)

But the question is. What's the point of taking down a website?

If their point is to make an issue known to the world, then I applaud them, it works beautifully. But from what I've seen over time, it feels like they're saying. "We have the power to shut you down if we want to." But in reality it's just trouble making.

Here's why "hacking" doesn't really work out in real life.
If you're hacking a government network, it's.. pretty impossible unless you know their network from the inside out. If a hacking does succeed, it just means that the internal personnel is not trained properly. Why? Because the important part is the internal network, if they want to they can just completely switch their network offline from the internet but they still have access to other services within their own compound.

A website, is just a front page. Truth is, not a lot of people visit a government page for no reason. The server is not built to take that much traffic.

A DDoS attack is simply generating so much shitty traffic that the server can't take it and shuts down. It is probably one of the most prominent attack online because it can't be stopped. You can filter it out but it still requires CPU power. A research from the people who deciphered Stuxnet (a ridiculous virus), estimate that if you have a botnet (a lot of computers linked together) of roughly 250,000. You can pretty much DDoS the shit out of everything. It is not impossible, but very impractical and will probably look suspicious.

So, taking down the front page of a government/music website, simply.. just shuts off their web for awhile, and it'll be back on. It is annoying, but definitely nothing more than a prick.

On the other hand, even if they had the ability to unleash a virus that could take down government networks. (or hold it hostage). It will be bad rep for them, because it'll become an act of terrorism. And that will cause all the best whitehat hackers all around the world to start hunting for them. And it wouldn't be a pretty sight to see an all out war online.

So the bottom line is this, their attacks are technically pointless, but I think the purpose is to raise awareness for everyone. I think it works. 

Hope you have a better understanding of the situation,
Till then my minions~

Labels: anonymous, DDoS, featured, internet, lordofgeeks, megaupload, thinking

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Thursday, December 22, 2011

I'll be rambling on. But there's a point to this, I swear. 

After that craze about the SSD, I've finally manage to settle down and reap the real benefits of it. Still, there are some kinks that I had to work out.

Firstly, I've made the switch from Google Chrome, to Mozilla Firefox.

It pains me to say that because I've been a big fan of chrome ever since day one. Literally, when Chrome was in beta (and we were still using our n00b XP computers), I was one of the few people who jumped on the bandwagon.

It's a great piece of software, but sadly, it got more bloated over the years. And there really isn't much settings that I can really dive into without going too deep.

The main problem is due to the cache settings. You cannot tweak the size that it uses, nor can you view the size of it easily. (if you want to, use CCleaner to analyze the size). It's huge, it could go up to 1GB++ Of course I can't let that happen when I only have 67GB left in my tiny little drive.

Firefox basically allows me to change more of the settings and set it the way I want it to. (and I loved Firefox before I switched)

p.s. the reason why I didn't use Firefox before was because it felt slightly sluggish in comparison. But it's not a factor anymore (:

Anyway, if you read my previous post,
I mentioned that the temperature of your computer will go up when using tweaks based on the HM55/PM55 motherboards. Here's the evidence.

Software is called HWmonitor

That's how hot it went when I was stressing it pretty hard. I've already disabled one of the tweaks so that it'll be safer.

Alright, so here's the other part of the story. Something that you will probably learn. I just got the fiber optic network installed (OpenNet) it's a Singapore thing, Google it if you're not local.

I have written a rather comprehensive guide on whether you should upgrade or not. Read more to find out!
Read more »

Labels: browsers, fiber networks, geek, google chrome, guide, hwmonitor, internet, mozilla firefox, opennet, singapore, ssd, starhub

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