Net Neutrality

"Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity [read content you transmit] online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake..." - Google.

If your mobile carrier in Pakistan discriminates and charges you separately (or with separate packages) for services (like WhatsApp or social media) that compete their basic services like SMS or Calls (and they all do), get VPN up on your cellphone for equal access to all of the internet and/or connect to a WiFi... !! #InternetNeutrality.

Privacy: Unlist yourself from Truecaller

If you think the world of smartphones is any safer to tread without care, I would like to remind you the fact that terms like "internet never forgets" and "world wild web" apply to the internet whether you use it from a personal computer or a smartphone.

Truecaller is a mobile app available on google play, iOS and several other market places that uses a crowd sourced telephone directory to tell you the names of people who call you even if they are not in your phonebook. The company claims to 'partly' gather its data from public sources and partly 'crowdsources' it. The latter is, however, incorrect to the extent of being misguiding at best and fraudulent at worst.

Upon investigating the app and its modus operandi, it is obviously and blatantly clear that the app harvests the data (names, numbers and other information; all linked) from the phonebooks of the users who have installed the application. I verified this with a simple trick. I had a friend install the app, and then a second person (without the app installed - infact without a smartphone) called a third phone which already had the app installed to see what information the app would display. The name on the third phone's truecaller app appeared exactly with the company prefix and nickname that was saved as on the first person's phone. This clearly showed that the app had uploaded his complete phonebook to its database under the pretext of the "necessary" permissions it requires to install the app and now displays the phone numbers and names of all his contacts to anyone in the world who has the app installed even though all those people never opted for such. This is clearly a breach of privacy.

To further verify this, please see this blog post on the same matter and this Quora thread that shows how many people this fact has made unhappy.

Are you on their database? If any one of the hundreds of your contacts including your friends, colleagues or the cable guy uses Truecaller to avail their database, your number has been harvested onto it via their phonebook.

Now the question is how to get yourself rid of this privacy issue and remove yourself from the Truecaller data base in order to keep your information safe including telling your name to simply anyone who has your number? To unlist yourself, the Truecaller website provides an unlist option. You can go to their unlist page and remove your number from their database by entering your number in the following format: +923001234567

Manage projects with Gmail stars

If you are having trouble with managing projects because they are not complicated enough to go for a full fledged project management software yet they are on your nerves because of their quantity and current status, a spreadsheet might not prove to be your best productivity tool, albeit a side reference option.

It is obvious that simple but multiple projects need on time email responses and follow ups. As per my previous suggestions of sticking to email convenience using hacky fully email based web services like Oh life, Follow Up Then and Bania.io, there's a way to solve all your problems related to multiple projects by simply using custom stars with your gmail inbox (that can be enabled from gmail settings).

As seen in the image on left, gmail stars can be very useful in marking status of a project's latest email and updating the star with  few clicks after the status changes right in the email and without having to invest time elsewhere; some times investing time in order to be productive in the long term is also a luxury you don't have - time is something that can always be well spent doing other things that you would rather be focusing on at this stage and minor lifehacks let you be more flexible to such stages of your start up.

Playing a mobile video on glass table

How to view a video on mobile why lying down.

Stripping formatting while copy pasting

More than often, you need to copy-paste data from websites and around the internet or even from within your own hardisk. Formatting of the text is something less wanted in many cases. Here are a few ways to get rid of the formatting:

1. Notepad: Copy-paste into note pad (in windows only) and then copy-paste it to the actual destination from their. Notepad won't support the formatting which is why it won't be carried along.
2. In-browser striping: Try pasting text into input boxes in a browser in any website. This can be the "status" input box of facebook or "search" box for google, when you cut the pasted text back out of it, the formatting will be gone.
3. Linux: Linux's text editors are smart unlike the notepad, they will preserve the formatting unless specifically told not to, but the recent versions of Linux support stripping formatting while pasting directly; simply use Ctrl+Shift+V when you want to paste a copied text without its formatting.

Do IM and SMS contribute to decay of language?

Considered to be retrogressive, the short message service might not have survived logically (Crystal). Yet, by the year 2001, the 160 character limit service which could be seen as a hinderance to open expression rather became widespread. 250 billion SMS had been sent globally by 2001. This much reliance on the short messaging resulted in debates over how it would affect the literature. Spread like a wildfire, the debate focuses on whether SMS would be the end of the civilization or a boost to learning. Some aspects of the short message service have helped children to acquire a better literary understanding (Crystal) but might also be used to mask dyslexia, incorrect spelling or simply laziness to write rather than optimizing the text per se. The ultra conciseness of the words tailored for the short message service and instant messaging on the internet chats has taken the shape of a new English dialect.

The massive increase in SMS has boosted up the mobile company earnings significantly. Britain, in the English speaking world is responsible for amounting up to 6 billion text messages a month (Huang) while Pakistan has taken one of the top positions after Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia for sending the most short text messages in the world adding up to 151 billion in the year 2009 alone and moving up to the third highest SMS sender in the year 2010 (Malik). This puts a new angle to the point of views debating the influence of IM and SMS on the literature and language. A developing country like Pakistan that has English as its second official language and to be used mostly in the higher education, hence being a notable part of the English speaking world, will be affected in a unique way by the way of SMS. The largely less educated population or atleast not as much educated and affluent in the English language have rather learned the language by the use of quick SMS messaging. The extremely low rates and encouraging services by the service providers have further ensured that the SMS trends leap ahead in a cut throat competition (Malik). It might be noted that the phonetic, orthographic and optimized approach of the SMS language makes it easy for even the relatively uneducated individuals to learn or process the English language (Chim). While this was not yet enough to be dealt with by a likely opponent of the SMS language, the new smart phones that come with the feature of predicting the next words and spell correction or auto completing ensure quick growth and ease of SMS (Chim). These features might be seen as only creating more laziness among the individuals and the society as a whole but, infact, they are also responsible for informally teaching the language to those who previously didn’t know even the formal writing. The ‘de-education’ of the literate might be an overrated accusation in this regard when the use of SMS is rather promoting a language.

On the contrary, instant messaging and short message service have been largely responsible for ‘romanization’ and ‘phoneticization’ of other languages (Chim). For English, where it is being considered mere ‘decivilization’ of the language by the technology, this might be interpreted as a hostile advancement or vandalism of other languages by pushing them to be written in English alphabet, with English itself standing the blame. In such a scenario, the SMS usage predominantly having english alphabet, English has been put on the side of the jargon itself as a language. By this approach, the SMS trend of writing billions of short messages in English alphabet means to re-evaluate the situation in an English versus all other languages scenario. Let us take Urdu, Pakistan’s national language, to be our example of comparison with English in terms of SMS related romanization. Urdu, which has itself been formed by a horde of languages becoming mutually intelligible to many over hundreds of years, is one of the most welcoming languages to the introduction of new words from other languages. It has infact taken most of its words from other languages and only a few that were developed natively over time. Comparing Urdu with English, and keeping it inline with the fact that Pakistan has achieved 3rd highest SMS usage in the world, proves that the language has influenced the use of SMS - Urdu written in roman alphabet - and made it easy to text even for those not much fluent in English. This means more and more english slang and words will be incorporated into Urdu over time as it merges with the SMS extensive usage by the population. The SMS texts employ elimination of vowels and the unnecessary syllables and sometimes uses numbers and letters to denote the phonology (Chim). It would be interesting to note that the Urdu alphabet and writing itself is already used in the same way. Urdu text does not contain any vowels or unnecessary syllables (being phonology oriented), rather the vowels are placed on the top of the letters as symbols like punctuation. These vowels are then omitted in general and literary writing when written for the native speakers as they are extremely obvious to be understood by the context or even the words themselves. This might be another reason that the SMS usage and romanization of Urdu has been very effective resulting in such a high usage of SMS in the country.

The use of SMS romanization seems interesting and welcoming, especially in case of languages like Urdu, as far as the concepts are concerned. But when looking at the facts that the alphabet that are being used are still English, even Urdu speakers might find it hostile for the de-education of their children; the gain of better grasp of language concept itself versus the loss of native alphabet, spelling and prose which is highly regarded in languages like Urdu. Vietnamese and other tonal languages have faced similar situations, their own script has been seen less and less as compared to the romanized versions (Chim). It is essential to find out whether or not the SMS romanization is a threat or will it be able to co exist with the native scripts of other languages.

If taken by the true global and neutral approach and not only being narrow visioned so as to only take English into account, the instant messaging and the short messaging service have largely amounted to decay of multiple languages in the world. The trend has not only put English on a hostile or imperial stance once again, but also become a threat to the global diversity. As far as the romanization can be kept separate from the actual literature and education, including general usage in media and magazines, it might survive the criticism of the host languages - but staying the course, SMS has been extremely detrimental to most scripts even including English. Such decay of language by the technology which happened to be progressive or simply easier to use in the English language might be overcome by introduction of local keyboards and keypads to supplement clear fonts of all the world languages. This is likely to introduce SMS jargon of its own for each language or somewhat make them mutually intelligible still - but after all, that’s what evolution is.

• Crystal, David (09 July 2009). Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. ISBN-10: 0199571333. Oxford University Press. Print.
• Huang, Lily (Aug 1, 2008 ). The Death of English (LOL). Newsweek Magazine. Web.
• Malik, Yasmin (November 15, 2011). Tech Society: Generation Text. The Express Tribune. Web.
• Chim, Chong Seck (March 9, 2004). SMS creating a virtual new written language. New Straits Times. Print.

Bulb (and globe) design

Bulb rigged up into a globe for an artistic interior life hack.

Fireplace art

Who says you can't have a modern, artistic, fireplace.

Shades of humour

Too many shades of humour to account for...

HBL-Mastercard launch mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) service in Pakistan

For developed countries or even large marts in developing countries, swiping a debit or credit card for payment is a routine payment method... but due to the equipment and other technological needs, small business and shop owners have never been able to use it to their advantage. They just deal in cash and that's something that makes life without pocket cash near to impossible.

The frugal nature of Juggaars is the core concept of tackling such scenarios. First it was micro finance solutions such as easy paisa and mobile banking in Pakistan that took care of the banking, bill payments and such needs.... now Habib Bank Limited is launching a service in collaboration with Mastercard which is an obvious follow suit for every other bank and probably for Visacard as well. The mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) service only requires the swipe device attached to the receivers' cell phone and an app to tag along with it - and that's it. You can now swipe your ATM / Debit card or a credit card at the general store or at the groceries next door.

The real question here is, how soon will it get to the street hawkers? ;)

Rise of today's hackers

An excerpt from a recent read:

Most of these hackers [from 1960s and 70s who were once limited to university facilities] would go on to form Silicon Valley start-up companies, lead the open-source software movement, and create small (or sometimes very large) fortunes for themselves. They entered the popular imagination not as hackers but as "computer geniuses" or "nerds."

Their progeny, the kids who would grow up with the PC in their homes and schools, were faced with a different set of problems and possibilities. These young hackers were born into a world of passwords and PIN numbers, created and made possible by the corporations that the old-school hackers had built. These younger hackers had no institutional affiliation and no limitations on access (at least to their own machines). Moreover, they saw that secrecy was a double-edged sword. Secrets can preserve an institution's identity, but, just as important, they can also protect a hacker from being identified. While a culture of secrecy provided for security, it also allowed for a new kind of anonymity, one that could be exploited and used to a hacker's advantage.

With these discoveries, the new-school hackers began to reach out to one another and create their own culture, a culture that expressed a general dissatisfaction with the world, typical of teenage angst, but also a dissatisfaction with ways technology was being used. For teenage boys discovering the ways that computers could be used to reach out to one another, there was nothing more disturbing than seeing those same computers being used to systematically organize the world. Groups of hackers began to meet, to learn from one another, and to form a subculture, which was dedicated to resisting and interrupting “the system.”

Fear was driving the popular imagination, and hackers were delighted to go along with the image. After all, what high school kid doesn't delight in the feeling that he or she rules a universe that their parents, teachers, and most adults don't understand? One thing teenagers understand is how to make their parents uncomfortable. Like loud music, teen fashion, and smoking cigarettes, hacking is a form of rebellion and an exercise of power. The difference rests in the fact that the 1990s represented such a fundamental break between youth and mainstream culture that hacking was unable to be successfully assimilated into the narratives of youth rebellion without being either wildly exaggerated or completely trivialized. Parents intuitively understand the defiance of music, youth fashion, and cigarettes; they did similar things themselves. With hacking, they are faced with an entirely new phenomenon. That gap, between what hackers understand about computers and what their parents don't understand, and more importantly fear, makes hacking the ideal tool for youth culture's expression of the chasm between generations. Hacking is a space in which youth, particularly boys, can demonstrate mastery and autonomy and challenge the conventions of parental and societal authority. Divorced from parental or institutional authority, the PC enabled the single most important aspect of formative masculinity to emerge, independent learning, “without the help of caring adults, with limited assistance from other boys, and without any significant emotional support.” Hackers used the personal computer to enter the adult world on their own terms. In doing so, they found a kind of independence that was uniquely situated. Hackers had found something they could master, and unlike the usual rebellious expressions of youth culture, it was something that had a profound impact on the adult world.

Hacker subculture has a tendency to exploit cultural attitudes toward technology. Aware of the manner in which it is represented, hacker culture is both an embracing and a perversion of the media portrayals of it. Hackers both adopt and alter the popular image of the computer underground and, in so doing, position themselves as ambivalent and often undecidable figures within the discourse of technology.

In tracing out these two dimensions, anxiety about technology and hacker subculture itself, I argue that we must regard technology as a cultural and relational phenomenon. Doing so, I divorce the question of technology from its instrumental, technical, or scientific grounding. In fact, I will demonstrate that tools such as telephones, modems, and even computers are incidental to the actual technology of hacking. Instead, throughout this work, I argue that what hackers and the discourse about hackers reveal is that technology is primarily about mediating human relationships, and that process of mediation, since the end of World War II, has grown increasingly complex. Hacking, first and foremost, is about understanding (and exploiting) those relationships.

In the past twenty years, the culture of secrecy, which governs a significant portion of social, cultural, and particularly economic interaction, has played a lead role in making hacking possible. It has produced a climate in which contemporary hackers feel both alienated and advantaged. Although hackers philosophically oppose secrecy, they also self-consciously exploit it as their modus operandi, further complicating their ambivalent status in relation to technology and contemporary culture.

The oldschool hackers of the 1960s and 1970s — who are generally credited with the birth of the computer revolution and who subscribed to an ethic of “free access to technology” and a free and open exchange of information — are thought to differ from their 1980s and 1990s counterparts, generally stereotyped as “high-tech hoodlums” or computer terrorists. Historically, however, the two groups are linked in a number of ways, not the least of which is the fact that the hackers of the 1980s and 1990s have taken up the old-school ethic, demanding free access to information. Further problematizing the dichotomy is the fact that many old-school hackers have become Silicon Valley industry giants, and, to the new-school hackers' mind-set, have become rich by betraying their own principles of openness, freedom, and exchange. Accordingly, the new-school hackers see themselves as upholding the original old-school ethic and find themselves in conflict with many old schoolers now turned corporate.

— Douglas Thomas (2002). Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press. Pg. xii, xiv, xx, xxi, xxii.

How to sock on Wikipedia

Shared via MZMcBride and encyclopediadramatica. This article is not meant for promoting sock puppetry though, it serves as an equal tool for those trying to catch it by understanding how it is done.

So you want to sock and not get caught? Well, it's not exactly easy, but there are definitely some things that can make it easier. The following are some tips for socking well.

Multiple accounts are the natural result of a non-anonymous website. People switch accounts just to stay anonymous. But a sock puppet is when a person uses these accounts to prove they've not gotten laid for a very long time, if ever. It is a tactic often used by trolls harrassing people on certain sites, faggots "trolling" on Wikipedia, and even pplz on ED who are evading a well-earned ban.

Anonymous websites let you samefag with little pissing away of your life and people can spot them with just a little bit of intelligence.

However, non-anonymous websites are MMORPGs where people work their sock accounts up to epic activity histories. Then when the sock puppets come by to back each other up, people look at their long histories of activity and go, "There's no way someone would spend that much of their time making all these accounts look like different people. They must be different people in real life because no one could have that less of a life spend that much time building these accounts up just to win some petty arguments."

And that, prey tell, is why sock puppets are effective. It's not that people can't tell, it's that they really don't want to believe.

Sockfarm

A sock farm is where someone creates a sock puppet account, and then another, and another, and another, and another... These accounts all make minor edits to articles aka "farming", and as many useless ones as they can to build up their edit count. They start having conversations with one another. Then they fall in love, get married, break up, and fight.

Eventually this farm is "harvested" and it can get administrators elected, articles deleted, kept, merged, and through sheer numbers make anything happen on Wikipedia that they want.

Of course you need a lot of time before getting the fruits of your farming, but it's worth the efforts. Eventually you will manage to control over 9000 sock puppets, have yourself elected as Sysop, have everyone banned, and then organize a massive raid (maybe with /b/tards, but they are not your personal army) in order to vandalize and delete the whole encyclopedia. Wikimedia will collapse, Jimbo Wales will be screwed and you will be considered as a legendary hero, even greater than Willy on Wheels or Grawp.

Anyway, you are too lazy to do it, aren't you?

Become familiar with the tracking tools

On Wikipedia there are those elite few, the Magic 40, that possess CheckUser abilities. This means that they check the IP addresses that any account edits from. While you're busy socking away there can be slip-ups: you might sign a post or edit a user page with the wrong account. Since this is Wikipedia after all, and suspicion is the order of the day there, this will be noticed. A CU will be notified and an IP check conducted: "ZOMG 34 accounts edited from ip 127.0.0.1." And you're screwed. But who wants that?

1. Use Tor. Liberally. If you're caught just say you're editing from China and that the secret police would kill you if they knew you were editing Wikipedia.
2. Use AOL. Yuck what internet veteran uses AOL you say? A smart one, AOL gives you a new IP with every page load. CheckUser=CheckUseless!
3. Open Proxies This is risky as they are blocked on sight, and just editing from an open proxy can be seen as a sign of trollkind. Well, yeah.
4. Use shared IPs like cybercafes and community colleges for some of your accounts.
5. Get in your car and go searching for unsecured Wireless hotspots. This is great when using troll socks to post power words. Maybe you'll even get someone else banned!
6. If you live in a city like Portland that offers wireless across town...well it can't get any easier than that.
7. Use different browsers. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session.

Since you'll likely be socking on a MediaWiki wiki, all of the documentation and source code of the extensions used by the software is publicly available. Read the page about the CheckUser extension and browse its source code if you know PHP decently.

Also, it's important to understand Wikimedia's configuration of the extension. The data available to CheckUser is only stored for 90 days. After that, it gets deleted.

Use different browsers

This is one of the easiest ways to sock. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session. Protip: you can tint backgrounds of edit textareas to distinguish them (slight reddish color for alt account, slight blueish color for master account, e.g.).

Use a shell account

Using SSH or a VPN, use a shell account to proxy. This masks your actual IP address and instead assigns you whichever IP you're proxying through.

Shell accounts can be purchased (from a web hosting provider) or most schools and offices have publicly available VPNs.

However, be warned that some proxies retain XFF headers (see below for more) and others don't. You'll likely need to spoof your headers to be safe.

Alter your headers

When a CheckUser checks your account, they can get header information that looks something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_4_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1

You need to spoof this info if you'll be using the same computer or browser to sock.

XFF

XFF headers reveal information about your originating IP address. As mentioned above, your proxy may strip the XFF headers, however this isn't guaranteed. Generally speaking, spoofing XFF headers is pointless.

User agent

User agent headers are easily spoofed. These reveal the browser you're using. If you're using two separate browsers as suggested above, it's probably still a good idea to spoof the user agent string as it always includes operating system information.

Alter your behavior

This is one of the most important steps to not get caught socking.

Time zones

It's trivial to map someone's contributions throughout the data. And sock trackers regularly use this tactic to spot patterns between accounts. Edit at different time zones with different accounts. Direct overlap between two accounts always looks suspicious.

Content areas

This is rather trivial to understand, yet many people get caught this way. To effectively sock, you have to edit in different areas than your master account. If your master account is involved in every bot discussion, your sock should not be. While it may be helpful to comment occasionally on bot discussions using your sock account to throw people off, you should avoid similar content areas.

It's equally important to avoid similar types of edits. If you're the master of fixing references, make your sock the master of writing content or the master of typo fixes. Don't have your two accounts making the same type of edits.

Edit summaries

This is another easy way to get caught. If you always edit using edit summaries, make sure your alt account does not. Also, make sure you use different types of edit summaries. For example, for a standard reply, many users use "+reply", "re", "r", or "reply". Some even copy and paste part of the message in the edit summary box. Whichever way you choose, be sure to not do the same thing on your alt account.

Writing style

This is very important if you make a lot of 'public' comments (comments on various noticeboards and talk pages). One obscure word used by both accounts and people could start to ask questions. If you're a poor speller, have one of your accounts use Firefox's spelling checker. If you always spell you as 'u,' well, you shouldn't do that for any reason. But if you do anyway, make sure your other account doesn't do the same thing. Writing style can quickly give away a user's true identity.

Talk with yourself

This is an incredibly tricky tactic that can easily backfire, but if done effectively, it can make it seem very, very implausible that the two accounts are connected. This should be done rarely, if at all. The occasional talk page comment to your alt account or point something out to them. Do not give them awards or constantly praise their work. That quickly raises suspicions, especially after a recent incident on the English Wikipedia.

Avoid double voting in major elections

Every user who votes for Board officials or for stewards is CheckUsered. Don't double vote in major elections unless you're sure that your IP information and XFF headers won't reveal a direct similarity.

Act your age

New accounts don't know about noticeboards. They don't usually even know about namespaces. Remember that when someone is examining your contributions history, a normal account always shows a predictable evolution. Be sure to keep this in mind when using your alt account. Sure, you can try to excuse your behavior with claims that you edited anonymously for years or whatever, but it's a whole lot easier to simply edit linearly (using edit summaries more often as time passes, exploring other namespaces, getting involved with the administrative side of things, etc.).

However, as a caveat, do not try to act like a completely new user. Blatant mistakes and downright stupidity will just get more attention focused on you. Play it cool and you'll have no issues.

DNS Propagation check

For quick checks on new DNS records that you update to your domain or if your domain records don't seem to be resolving, WhatsmyDNS.net gives out a totally clear picture of which name servers are currently holding updated zone records of your domain name.

This also maps out which name server is holding what record at the moment. So if your case was just that of modification from one to another record, you can change that too in a list along with the map. On the other hand, for the newly added records, things are even better.. the map shows an overlay of ticks and crosses over the world map and DNS servers.

Maintain productivity chain with Bania.io

Bania.io lets you send an email to WalkEveryDay@bania.io whenever you take a walk and the website will start giving you output, charts with proper shades and a productivity chain for your tasks that you regularly email to bania.io. You can send emails for WeekendHike@bania.io every weekend and it will record how often you have missed your hikes on weekends. There is no login involved and no settings needed, the charts are automatically sent to your email inbox so there's no need of an extra layer of security. Like my previous post about FollowUpThen, the focus is on getting your email to work for you right from your inbox instead of logging in to different websites, maintaining accounts. Email is something that has already been made secure and easy to handle. There would be almost no one on the internet that would not use email. Getting most out of email is one of the simplest way of productivity hacking and bania.io gives you the clean graphical side of it.

On every email, Bania.io replies you with a heatmap of your streak. As you keep repeating, the chart spreads over the calender letting you find out how regular you have been over days and months.

Although this might be quiet handy for those looking to improve their productivity in real life, now wonder what an internet hacker could do with a tool like this. For starters, I would go for a combo... combining IFTTT, FollowUpThen and Bania.io automating your internet tasks without even having to regularly email bania.io manually. Okay... so thinking out loud; how about creating a report about how often you (actively) use Facebook (check for triggers), or how often you receive / send email, or perhaps how often you follow up on tasks that you put in your google drive / dropbox? The possibilities are as much as the resources on internet ;)

Pakistani R&D start up designs ad hoc WiFi Gadget

Shared via Highbrows; Pakistan's first applied sciences blog.

Pakistani Tech and R&D startup, Highbrows Engineering & Technologies, creates a gadget that uses a battery to power up Evo Wingle anywhere for highspeed WiFi internet on the go for cellphones.

See below for images of the gadget taken from the Highbrows official blog: Ad hoc on the go Wifi from Evo Wingle without a power socket:

Sync between Dropbox, Google drive and OneDrive

After a long search for cloud syncing mechanisms that do not involve your PC to first download and then re-upload the files wasting precious bandwidth, and certainly not involving any paid accounts, MultCloud is the nearest solution with a outlook and windows 8 like web theme. It allows you to sync remotely between all mainstream cloud services without downloading the data first. The files are directly copied between the services - finally you can get the best of all your favourite services, sync between them and even use all their combined space for a larger storage for free. Now remotely downloading torrents to dropbox is only one of the magic things you can get from cloud.

The only caveat is that the website needs a lot of features inspite of its user friendly theme. Any syncing between the services has to be done manually by copy pasting the files or folders as displayed in the multcloud console. This is very user friendly if it is to be done for the sake of backing up, but not for continuous syncing. IFTTT would still be a better method for continuously syncing files. What multcloud needs to beat everything else in its competition is a feature that makes continuous two way syncing between the services fully automated. That is, virtual directories created in OneDrive (for example) copy or take in the data from dropbox (for backup). Or anything added to one service automatically updates in the other without having to login to multcloud. This would not only bring alot of free users to multcloud (which would then ofcourse like to upgrade for its current premium services) but also make the multcloud users refer much more friends to the network turning it into a hub for cloud management

The biggest turn off for multcloud is that you have to keep the console open till all your files are synced between the services or the connection is broken (and on top of it, the transfer is quite slow if you are copying a multitude of files and sub folders). So even if you did it manually, you have to stay on the web page. That hardly makes it the best of the remote syncing services, but it's a good starter as its very user friendly interface makes up for the rest.

Some alternative services are ZeroPC (1 Gb/bandwidth per month for free users) and Storage Made Easy (2 Gb/bandwidth per month for free users). However, their FAQs show almost exactly same features and unless better flexibility, higher transfer speed and the option of closing the browser (transferring in background) are not their plus points they do not stack up well at all against the unlimited bandwidth of the free multcloud service.

For now, I only use it for creating one time back ups from DropBox to OneDrive. If there's a service that catches up with the idea of unattended automation (without involving premium ofcourse), feel free to drop in comments and I will update this post.

World populations

Kind of a mix, but Facebook has the highest population after India.

Remotely download torrents to dropbox

I wanted to download torrents directly instead of leaving my computer on and waiting for those slow seeders who often even went offline. Previously I shared how to download a torrent file as a normal download which covered this to some extent. Zbigz.com turned out to be something that would allow up to 1 GB free torrent downloads as normal files... now the issue with them is that you've to open the website and get your download and wait till it completes.

Boxopus.com does it even better. It allows you to link your dropbox account to your boxopus free account and lets you download the file to your dropbox account, which dropbox will automatically sync to your computer or other devices. Now we know that dropbox checks for illegal and pirated files by checking the meta data. Hopefully any movies you download wont be a problem until you publicly share those files as those checks are performed on the publicly shared dropbox folders.

How applet culture is ruining native culture

Browser and mobile apps are trending so much that native software are losing ground... as a result we are losing good quality software available on native desktops. Affected domains by browser based apps:

• Gaming
• Command and conquer shifting to web.
• Web based small games that suck... all those facebook invites to games that no gamer wants.
  
  
• Applications and tools:
• Google talk vs Google hangouts - Skype is easy for newbies and so was Google talk. Google hangouts doesn't stay open without browser and lacks the quality of a native app.
• User friendly vs complex: techie oriented in case of apps but native apps can be used by most users (generally(.
• Microsoft's integration of web apps with the windows 8 desktop - good way to go and a hope for better trends and integration. No matter how much free software users may hate Microsoft, but Microsoft is sticking to their aspiring for user friendly interfaces and hence retaining the general population as customers where as Google is even tangentially leaning against their own data liberation freedom trends that they beat the market with by not allowing mass download of hangout chats like they do with email and forcing browser based hangouts on users who were happily using Gtalk as a native application.
• Browser overloading as a result of running so many non native browser based apps.
• Browser environment vs desktop environment: comfort; if you have used native applications, you will know how much more user comfort they provide as compared to web apps, speed: native applications are always tapped into the hardware and middle level resources and are mostly much faster.
• Web apps hardly fully use all the hardware resources a computer provides.

On the other hand collaboration and syncing may go better with the app culture; better collaboration (online and live) in Google docs than in Dropbox (which needs saving files repeatedly to sync).

Download it all

I'll just download the whole discography... giving a new level to piracy.