Categories
Internet Technology

Connecting to the internet via an unsecured wireless connection

The BBC has a very interesting article on connecting to the Internet via an unsecured wireless connection, is it wrong to do that? The person is the one offering the connection for free, but taking the internet from him might slow down his connection!
I have a wireless connection at home, it is a secured one but I always check the logs of the router and check the connected computers, I also turn off the router when I am not using the internet, I do that because I know that my connection is secure and connecting through it involves hacking and this would be stealing and I would make the person stealing my connection pay for this (info on how to do that later).
But what if I left my connection unsecured? Connecting through it would be very simple, the person doing it would be taking something that he isn’t paying for but this connection is available for him!
I never found an unsecured connection so I never had the chance to connect to one, but I am pretty sure that if I ever found one I would at least test it’s speed but would never check my mail on it, maybe a person is offering this connection for free and monitoring the traffic to take info! I think that everyone is responsible for his connection and if you leave a door open you can’t blame someone for taking a peak inside!

Router WiFi

Categories
Internet Photography

A Source for great Pictures

Vernal Falls Rainbow

Wikipedia is a source of articles for school and university projects but it can be also be a great source for pictures and wallpapers, just check Wikipedia’s featured pictures page, here’s the page description from Wikipedia

This page highlights images that the Wikipedia community finds beautiful, shocking, impressive, and/or informative. It is the visual equivalent to featured articles and as such even more subjective. Images are categorized by the topic they represent, which is not necessarily what you might expect just by looking at the picture. There is also a category for images with aspect ratios suitable for wallpapering.

There are currently 863 featured pictures.

USAF in desert storm

Categories
Internet Lebanon

ADSL in Lebanon

I wanted to check and compare the ADSL prices between different ISPs in Lebanon but apparently they all have the same prices:

  • 24$ for 128kbps up/32kbps down, 2GB monthly bandwidth
  • 34$ for 256kbps up/64kbps down, 3GB monthly bandwidth
  • 47$ for 512kbps up/128kbps down, 4GB monthly bandwidth
  • 77$ for 1024kbps up/256kbps down, 5GB monthly bandwidth

The only difference between ISPs is the size of the mailboxes you get with your account, and a few dollars between modems available, Terranet offers to double your speed from 8pm to 8am but adds “Free Double Speed Feature is subject to feasibility study.” so I don’t know if you can get a doubled speed at night.

I also doubt that the monthly limit is enough now that people watch a lot of videos and download a lot of media from the internet.

ADSL

Categories
Funny Internet

Bruno Bozzetto Flash Animations

Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian producer and animator who is recently producing great flash animations, I first watched one of his animation in class, the teacher wanted to explain the difference between civilizations so he showed us a Bozzetto Animation about the difference between the Italian customs and the European ones, I really liked the animation and found that Italians are very similar to Lebanese (watch it and you will wee why) so I downloaded the animation when I got home, today I found Bruno’s site and on the site you can watch all his animations so check them out.

Difference between Europe and Italy

Categories
Internet Lebanon

The Internet is Back

In Lebanon you can’t have decent internet, it’s either an over priced modem connection, a bandwidth Limited ADSL connection (that didn’t reach my area yet) or a not very legal (nor illegal) Cable connection depending on the region, I picked the 3rd option, so I have a 256K connection with unlimited bandwidth.
What’s bad in this connection is that it is not very stable, usually they manage to make it work 24 hours a day, but sometimes it just disconnects for an unspecified period of time, for example yesterday at midnight it disconnected and it just came back 10 minutes ago (18 hours!), but that’s the best we can currently get here, so I just have to live with it!

Categories
Internet

Hotmail Upgraded

Apparently Hotmail (or Windows Live Hotmail) got improved and is now out of Beta, so I just checked my Inbox and I now have 5GB of storage (Google charges 20$ for 6GB!), and according to Hotmail’s program manager that’s not it, Hotmail should also be faster and easier to navigate now.

Here’s the full list of updates:

Performance: We’ve been hearing you loud and clear across the world: speed is one of the most important aspects of a web-based email service. We’ve spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we’ll continue our work on performance in future releases.

Quality of Service: Our last release went quite smoothly, and we’ve been continuing to monitor the live site to make sure that we’re providing e-mail that is reliable – you always want to be able to get to your mail, and we hear you!

More storage! Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail, we’ve given you more storage. Free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage.

Mail retention changes: We’ll be increasing the amount of time that we leave messages in your junk and deleted items folders over the next few months.

Contacts de-duplication: Do you have five different entries for the same person in your Contacts? Yeah, me too, but not anymore. We’re the first webmail service to roll out “contacts de-duplication”. If you get a message from “Steve Kafka” and click “add contact” but there’s already a Steve Kafka, we’ll let you know and let you add Steve’s other e-mail address to your existing “Steve Kafka” contact entry. We’re just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There’s also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts.

Show content more easily: Hotmail blocks images and links in messages from unknown senders for your protection from spammers and phishing scams. Now you can click directly on the gray square or link to decide if you want to show content in a message. (It’s still not a good idea to show content, especially images, in messages from spammers. Just loading the images in a spam lets them know that you’re reading their e-mails.)

Spam-fighting: We’ve made it possible to report phishing attacks like those fake bank notices or fraudsters who want your checking account number so they can supposedly make a deposit. Just click “report phishing” if you think you’ve found a dangerous scam. In the junk folder, click “not junk” to help train our filters. Every mail you report does help make our spam filter smarter, but fighting spam takes constant vigilance. Spammers always find a new trick whenever we thwart their old tricks.

Right-to-left languages: Support for Hebrew and Arabic is now out of beta! If you speak these languages or want to see Hotmail in a totally new way, go to Options and change your language. We fixed a lot of bugs for users of Hebrew and Arabic, so we hope the whole UI works better for you now.

More space for your email, a.k.a. smaller header: We heard you asking for more space for your mail, so we shrunk the header in this update.

Forwarding messages: You can now forward mail from your Hotmail account to other accounts. For now, if you have a free account, you can only forward your mail to other Hotmail accounts. (Paid accounts get more choices.) This is great idea if you have a few different addresses and want to consolidate your mail.

Cobranding: This is what we call showing the logo of an organization for whom we are hosting email. Hotmail is currently hosting e-mail for universities (and a few ISPs) around the world, so we show their logos in Hotmail.

Accepting meeting requests: If you receive a meeting request, such as one sent from Outlook, you can now click “accept” and have it added to your Calendar. This had existed for years in MSN Hotmail, and we’re adding it to Windows Live Hotmail now.

Vacation replies: Now Hotmail can automatically tell your friends why you haven’t written them back in a few weeks.

Classic version jump to page: In the classic version, we’ve made it easier to jump to different pages of mail. This will be very handy as you grow into your new 5 GB or 10 GB account.

And finally… Drumroll please… we know this is going to be a big hit with a lot of you out there in blog land. I hope you remember this as the Hotmail team listening to what you want.

You can turn off the Today page (if you want to). If you’d rather see your inbox immediately upon login, you have the option to turn off the page of MSN news (called the Today page). The choice is yours.