For many years now I’ve used Giganews‘s excellent but some-what expensive service as my usenet (newsgroups) provider. Recently I’ve been open for change, especially the kind of change that saves me money. The latest thing to get me going was looking into some VPN service that looks interesting and costs $5 a month, so that got me thinking abut how much I’m currently spending on online services, and the most expensive service is Giganews. Plus, a friend at work said he was using a different – cheaper provider called Astraweb and that he was very happy with them. Astraweb is a well-known provider that I’ve heard about for years, so I finally decided to try them out and I’m very glad I did !

Astraweb has two pricing systems: unlimited subscription plans and pay-by-download plans

Unlimited Subscription plans

• All plans have unlimited quotas.
• Plans are either limited to 10mbit speed or not limited at all.
• 20 connections.
• Cost: $10/m with 10mbit speed or $20/3m.
• Cost: $15/m with no speed limit or $39/3m.

Pay-by-download

• Pay for a download allowance that has no time limit.
• No recurring payments.
• 50 connections.
• Variety of download packages: 25gb / 180gb / 1,000gb
• Costs for packages above: $10 / $25 / $50
• Bandwidth per dollar: 2.5gb / 7.2gb / 20gb !

Although I’m a pretty heavy usenet user and as such would usually look for the unlimited subscription plan, I was actually drawn to the 1,000gb (1Tera) download package worth $50. After checking my Giganews account I discovered that it took me around 9months to reach 1,000gb last year. That means that if you divide $50 by 9months – it comes down to about $5.5 per month. Currently I’m paying Giganews $25 a month so that’s a huge difference which translates to about $240 a year – half of my next iPad

What I recommend to anyone who wants to check astraweb out for themselves before making the switch is goto their account and suspend it for a period of time while you check out the competition (I suspended mine for 2 months). If you see that it works well for you, just go back to Giganews to cancel your account completely.

Astraweb Miscellaneous

• 1413 days retention.
• Accept PayPal and credit cards.
• Have both US & EU servers.
• Supports SSL connections.
• Normal Ports: 119, 23, 1818, 8080
• SSL Ports: 443, 563

Process

1. Suspend Giganews account.
2. Buy astraweb 1,000gb plan for $50 using a simple PayPal payment.
3. Sabnzbd (usenet client) – configured one server to astraweb’s european server and left the other on Giganews, then I disabled the old Giganews server and enabled the new Astraweb server.
4. Tested download – got my full 15mbit with a 25 connections setup.
5. Re-enabled Giganews server and at the end of the month, after the giganews suspension kicks in, I’ll re-enable the new astraweb server, and later on I’ll probably cancel Giganews all together.

Happy savings and happy hunting !

Reblogged from her new leaf:

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I am still obsessed with Instagram - are you? I think it's a great way to capture small, every-day moments that you might otherwise forget. I love looking back over my photos and remembering when I took them! Here are a few tips for how to make your Instagrams shine.

Use your phone's camera app to take your photo, then import into Instagram.

Read more… 394 more words

Reblogged from TechCrunch:

Reblogged from GigaOM:

On its third turn doing a global iPad roll out, Apple(s AAPL) seems to have its supply chain humming along nicely this year. The new iPad, which is already for sale in 35 countries as of today, will be showing up on shelves in 12 new countries this Friday, Apple announced Monday. And by the following Friday, it'll arrive in nine more countries, for a total of 56 in about six weeks.

Read more… 166 more words

If those personas were using a password manager, such as “LastPass“, they could have probably avoided this horrific invasion of their privacy. This is yet another example of the dangers users face when they get into the bad habit of using the same password for different systems. Learning your password from one system gives hackers the opportunity to hack into your other systems.

Recently I’ve written a post about using a password manager to avoid these sort of attacks. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do so, and pass it along to your friends and family before the same thing happens to them.

Essentially Apple has decided to relax a few harsh restrictions it previously placed into its developers agreement. For example – a restriction on the usage of 3rd party developer tools & languages has been lifted, making it possible to develop an iOS app with monotouch using c#, and perhaps even with Adobe Flash tools.

The second announcement, which perhaps is even more important is that Apple has finally decided to shed some light on their app review process and published the “App Store Review Guidelines“. There are a lot of interesting points, and some are written with very blunt language, making the document more interesting and at times even funny. The document is pretty short, so I recommend reading it through.

This came a quite a shock to me, since it seems so impervious to the wailing of developers and consumers alike, but Apple announced today via an official press release that it would be relaxing some of its iOS development restrictions. In a move toward greater transparency, it’ll also publish its App Store Review Guidelines for the first time. To quote Apple: We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened t … Read More

via TheAppleBlog

The one good thing to come out of this, was writing this ‘how-to’ article for my readers, so they know what to do in the event this happens to them too.

The following applies to the aluminum unibody Macbook/pro line, but most of it applies to any laptop.

Phase 1 – First-Aid:

1. Lift Macbook in the air and flip it upside down so the liquid doesn’t seep inside as much.
2. Press & hold the power button until it completely shuts down. Forget about doing a ‘safe shutdown’, it’s better to deal with software failures or some data loss, than hardware damage.
3. Disconnect any cables attached to Macbook.
4. Safely set down the Macbook on a clean surface.
5. Get some absorbent paper.
6. Gently use the paper to soak the spill from your Macbook keyboard. Don’t press hard or the spill will seep into the keys. You can either do this with the Macbook still upside down or flip it back so it’s easier to clean.

Phase 2  - Cleaning:

1. After soaking the spill take a damp cloth or dampen absorbent paper, and gently clean the keyboard and other places that were spilled over. Don’t forget to clean the bottom as it was probably stained too. Make sure you’re not using too much water, remember this is a delicate electronic device – not your dirty dishes.
2. Now it’s pretty clean, but there will still be some sticky residue. Remove the residue with some rubbing alcohol applied to cue-tips for the keyboard keycaps and use a clean cloth with alcohol for the larger surfaces.(Alcohol will vaporize fast which is why it’s good for cleaning electronics, and it breaks grease & grim very efficiently).
3. You may want to remove keyboard keycaps to clean & dry the liquids that might have leaked inside. To be honest, I removed and cleaned only a few keys for the following reasons:
   A. My coffee spilled on only a part of my keyboard.
   B. Because I quickly responded with the measures written above, and only a bit of liquids leaked inside.
   C. I’m pretty lazy
   My recommendation is to do at least a few keys, to get an estimate of how much liquid got in. If it’s just a bit you can stop, but if it’s a lot then you really should take them all apart and clean thoroughly. In any case, you can always do this in the future if your key presses feel sticky.
   A nice youtube video tutorial which I used as reference.
   How to remove the ‘Enter’ key.

Tips:

• Be gentle ! This is true whenever you’re dealing with delicate electronic devices, and especially true with keyboard keys. Nothing should be done with excessive force. If you’re applying a lot of force – you’re doing something wrong.
• When using liquids, be it water or alcohol, use moderate amounts – you are NOT giving your laptop a bubble bath !
• After cleaning the laptop, don’t turn it on until everything has dried. Be patient ! you can also use a hair-drier to speed things up.
• If the spill leaked inside anything else, e.g: DVD drive, cable ports, etc’ this guide will not be enough, and you’ll need to clean those too before powering on the device. In this event I would recommend taking your laptop to a professional lab.
• video tutorials website for removing keyboard parts – http://www.laptopkey.com
• Don’t drink coffee near your computer !

Shipping delays have quietly shrunk from 5-to-7 business days to 3-to-5 days The iPad shortages that delayed the launch of the iPad 3G and pushed back the international roll-out by a month have finally started to ease. In a note to clients issued Wednesday, Susquehanna Financial’s Jeff Fidacaro notes that iPad shipping delays, wh … Read More

via Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine

Facebook launched its much anticipated location-based features yesterday, called Facebook Places. Facebook Places lets you check-in to places and share your location with your friends, much like Foursquare (currently places is available only in the US).

Back in April, rumors surfaced that Facebook (among others, including Yahoo & Microsoft) tried to acquire Foursquare for more than $100 million, but Foursquare resisted in favor of a $20 million cash investment from a venture capital fund.
Even though foursquare check-ins will also push updates to Facebook Places, I believe users will prefer to use Facebook Places rather than go to yet another service – and considering the huge users base and popularity of Facebook – it seems like Facebook Places will eventually crush Foursquare and that Foursquare will be very sorry they didn’t accept the offer.

Mashable posted an interesting article about Facebook Places, that includes a useful how-to section:

How to Use Places

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First of all, you or a Facebook friend in your group will need a smartphone. If you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll have to use the Facebook touch mobile site on a browser that supports both HTML 5 and geolocation.The company does plan to roll out Android and BlackBerry versions of Places, but they haven’t released any specific dates for those releases yet.To use Places, go to the Places tab on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com. You’ll first be asked if Facebook is allowed to know your location. Once you click “allow,” you’ll enter the Places interface. From there, you can share your location with friends, find out where your friends are (if they’re using Places), and discover new places near you.You can add places, check in to places that already exist, and tag people who are with you. If you’re checking in for a group, make sure you tag your friends before you checkin, yourself. For example, I added my house and checked in there. I then opened the Places page for a nearby sushi restaurant, tagged my boyfriend, and checked us both in there.

A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places [Mashable]

This mission will be broken into a series of posts starting with this one, which will focus on protecting your online identity. First, let’s begin by understanding the subject.

Identity Theft Background
You might be asking, what does it mean to have your online identity stolen ? Which services will it affect ?

• Email – hacked email accounts will keep their true owners locked out. All their contact information, email correspondence with friends, family and co-workers, may be lost for ever. If they used Gmail, it means that all their other google services accounts, such as Picasa, googleDocs and googleTalk , have been hacked too, and the information stored within them, has been compromised. Not only have they lost access to it, but those hackers can freely distribute that information to whomever, and whenever they like.
• Facebook – A hacked Facebook account means that all your friends, family members and co-workers are now in contact with a hacker instead of you. He will take advantage of this in many ways: He might convince your Facebook friends to give him information they would only give out to you as their friend, or for spite, damage your relationships by writing obscenities, lies or by posting private correspondence that he retrieved from your email account. Those of you who use Facebook as a photo archive face the danger that the hacker will delete all their cherished photos.
• Online Banking – Obviously, one of the most damaging aspects of having your online identity stolen is having your finances open for attack. If you, like many, switched to online banking, supplemented perhaps by pay pal, your hacker might now turn into a thief as well – making money transfers or buying online goods. You can and should expect the worst of the unscrupulous hacker.
• voIP services - Using Skype, Jahjah or countless other voIP services exposes you to numerous dangers. First, many voIP services are connected to your credit card, and the hacker can run up your phone tab. Second, the hacker might use your contact list and assume your identity for fraudulent activities. Third, the same as with Facebook, he can wreak havoc on your relationships.

Those are just a handful of exploits you are exposed to, when you fall victim to online identity theft, but I guess that’s enough of me “scaring the shit out of you !”.
In-order to achieve peace of mind, you need to understand how most identity thefts happen, and what you can do to be protected.
Let me reassure you, although there are numerous ways to steal your identity, most of you are subject to only a couple, and the solution is simpler than you might think.

Example – The ‘Homeless’ Saga
Let’s take for example a very well-known attack that has been exposed a while ago. An Israeli real-estate site called ‘Homeless‘, which helps users rent, buy and sell properties has been hacked by Turkish hackers, and around 40,000 registered user accounts have been compromised. Many of those users probably had their identities stolen too.

The hackers managed to retrieve from ‘homeless’ a list of user accounts, which included both email addresses and passwords used to log into ‘homeless’. Homeless’s first mistake was allowing their website to be hacked, and their database to be stolen. Their second mistake was in keeping users passwords in a clear text form, as opposed to keeping only hashed passwords, which are unreadable and can’t be reversed to learn your original password. Keeping password in clear text means, that anyone gaining or having access to their database, from hackers to company workers, can easily view your password. There is really no excuse for this bad practice, but unfortunately many companies do that exactly ! One way of learning if this is the case with a certain online service, is by attempting a password recovery process. If the system sends you back your password, it could mean trouble. What you are looking for, is a system which does not know your password, and therefore can’t retrieve it. A system like that would issue you a new password instead.

So how does learning your email and password from one site enable a hacker to steal you identity ? well the answer to that is pretty simple – most users use only a few passwords to access all their online services, and usually they are all based on the same password with some variation. Once the hacker has those details, he will first attempt to hack your email account, from which he can usually gather more information to hack other services. First, he will look for registration emails with more login details. Second, he can carry out password recovery operations for any service tied to that hacked email account. Even he does not manage to gather more passwords from your email, he can find the usernames of your online services from registration mails, and with the one password he already has, attempt to access them. If the password does not match, he’ll try variations of the password he has, and a lot of you know, doing that will allow him to hack into many of your online accounts.

Preventing Identity Theft
Now we understand that a broad attack will leave the less weary users, those using only a few, generic and simple passwords at great risks, while users with many complex passwords will be less vulnerable. There are other forms of attacks, but that’s enough information about the attacks for now. Bottom-line, you need to start using different passwords for each online service, and they need to be complex – termed ‘strong’ passwords.

O.K – it’s time for me to make good on my word, and help you achieve the promised bliss and peace of mind. What you are going to do is start using a password manager software that helps you manage and create different, unguessable, strong passwords, for each online service that you use. You might be thinking that switching to strong passwords and many of them at that, is not practical and a hassle, but please have faith that the solution I present here, will be both simple and hassle-free. To accomplish that, it must meet the following requirements:

• One-click automatic login – eliminates the need to type the strong passwords you will now use. Without this, it would be a hassle to type them manually, and this overcomes potential threats from key loggers (It’s alright if you don’t know what key-loggers are, just be glad this offers more security).
• Password Generator with customization – it’s hard to believe how hard it is, to come up with your own complex and random passwords, especially when you need to do this for many services, while conforming to different length and permitted character requirements, that each service imposes.
• Centralized solution on the web so you don’t need to worry about backups, or syncing issues when using multiple PC’s and devices, and it has to be available wherever and whenever you may need it.
• Multi-platform – will work on any device you throw at it. Supports windows, Mac and Linux machines, and various mobile devices: iPhones, windows mobile, blackberry, android and Nokia’s Symbian.
• Multiple browsers integration – plugins available for whichever browser your prefer: IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.
• Open – allows you to keep an encrypted local backup, so you can always switch to another solution if you wish.
• Advanced features – Although most of you will not find this relevant, at least not in most situations, I felt it was important, the solution offered advanced features like: multiform authentication, phishing protection, one-time passwords and portable solutions. I will not explain these features in this post, but perhaps dedicate another for them in the future.

LastPass Password Manager
The solution I chose is called ‘LastPass‘ and it answers all the requirements listed above, and then some. Most of their solution is free, and for one dollar a month (12$/yr) you will get their mobile-device applications and advanced features. I suggest you begin with the free version, which you can easily upgrade later.

How to get started with LastPass password manager ?

1. Register – Goto https://lastpass.com/create_account.php or first download installation, which will give you the option to register as part of the installation process. In any case it’s best to read the following registration tips:
   • Email address – register with the email address that you use most.
   • Security Question – Choose a security question that no one can find the answer to, by doing a little research. You type your own question so choose something smart. Your dog’s name or kids birthdays or anything of that nature, is not good enough. Choose something you can’t forget, because it will be used for password recovery, and they are serious about security, so don’t expect any leniency if you aren’t able to recover your password.
   • Master Password – the solution is based on you having a master password to unlock your password vault, containing all the login details of your online services. This password should be complex, but I recommend using something that you can remember. Make sure the password you choose has both alphabetical characters and numerical characters, plus special characters such as ‘@’, ‘$’,’ !’, ‘?’.
     LastPas will allow you to save your master password in all its different applications, browser plug-ins & extensions, but I recommend that you don’t do that, at least for a while, until you feel the password you chose is engraved in your mind, and won’t be forgotten.
2. Download software
   1. Goto https://lastpass.com/misc_download.php
   2. There are many LastPass plugins and applications, based on the platform you use. When you choose a platform it will also recommend a plugin for download. If you are on a windows machine it will recommend a universal plugin, that installs on all three major browser: IE, Firefox and Chrome. You should use that or just download the plugin for the browser you use most.
   3. During the installation, you can either login with the account you created before, or create a new account, if you haven’t done so already.
   4. Importing logins – you may choose during installation to import your previously saved login details from your browser. I recommend doing so, as this list will be a good starting point for changing all your current passwords to new unguessable, strong passwords.
   5. After installation a LastPass button will appear in your browser. Use it to open the LastPass menu, giving you access to your password vault, settings, shortcuts and other features.
3. Replacing old passwords with strong passwords (View how-to-video instead)
   1. Use the LastPass button in your browser to access the ‘sites’ menu, which displays a list of all the sites you’ve imported. Clicking on a site will navigate your browser to that service and automatically log you in. If you didn’t choose to import your sites during installation, you may do so at any time by using the ‘import from’ option under ‘tools’. Select your browser from the list and your done !
   2. Start a ‘change password’ procedure.
   3. When you need to enter a new password, if the LastPass header isn’t displayed with the ‘generate password’ button you can right-click on the ‘new password’ form field on the site, and you’ll find under the ‘LastPass’ menu item the ‘generate secure password’ option.
   4. This will open a dialog box with password customization options. It’s obvious that the longer your password is, and the more characters types it has, the stronger and more secure it is. But you can settle for just 12 alphanumeric chars. I’m sure it will still be much more secure, than what you have used until now. By the way, I use 16 chars with both alphanumeric chars and special chars. (Don’t forget, LastPass will fill in passwords automatically, so feel free to create long & complex passwords !)
   5. Press the ‘accept’ button which will fill in the ‘new password’ field, or copy-paste it inside. I recommend using the ‘accept’ button, which also saves the password independently in your password vault, and will show as ‘generated password for xxxx’, which is good for troubleshooting scenarios.
   6. Finish the ‘Change Password’ procedure by clicking on a corresponding ‘Save Button’.
   7. LastPass will present its header at the top of page, acknowledging a password has been changed and pressing the ‘Confirm” button displayed in the LastPass header, allows you to save the new password for that site.

1. Changing an old password to a strong, secure password:

2. Adding an online service to your LastPass passwords vault.

Although LastPass is easy to use, there are still many subjects and features I could not cover in one post. I urge you to begin using this solution, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me and I promise to help you out.

Be safe & prosper
Gezer

Other password managers worth mentioning:

• keepass – Free open-source, cross platform solution.
• 1password – Mac based with a beta stage windows application.
• RoboForm – Well-known Windows solution.
• Clipperz- Web based solution.