Integrating Browsers with Bittorrent

The two browsers, Opera and Mozilla Firefox will soon have built-in Bittorrent downloaders.

Opera is already ready to release a test package.

For Firefox, Mozilla has started the Moztorrent project with the aim of releasing the moztorrent plugin and another standalone BT client named as "watermonkey".

Well.. how about Microsoft IE. Researchers at Microsoft's computer science lab in Cambridge have developed a peer-to-peer filesharing system called Avalanche. Using a proprietary network coding technique, the researchers claim download times are between 20-30 per cent faster than BT. It is not yet known if Avalanche will part of future release of IE.

ECS 760GX-M Mother Board

I bought this motherboard with an Athlon XP-M 2800+ CPU at HK$990.

The onboard SiS 760GX chipset can display 3D graphics and the maximum sharable memory can be up to 128M. That is to say, a PC game station can be realized but it is naive to expect playing high-end 3D games without resorting to a high quality AGP8X 3D display card.

My budget for a game station with this motherboard is just HK$2200. Wooooooo., about the prices of AMD Sempron 2000 PC stations sold in Sham Shui Po.

Anti-spam measure of Netvigator

Netvigator has established two SMTP servers for its customers to send out email. For those that have the sender email addersses as @netvigator.com, @hkstar.com, they could use "mail.netvigator.com" and no SMTP authentication is required. However, in case users have sender email addresses from other domains, they must use the second mail sever "smtp.netvigator.com". For connection to this mail server, SMTP authentication by means of POP password is required.

Though the security is tightened, I do not see how these measures could deter users from spaming.

Security key fob

HSBC will issue to Internet bank account users a security token device in the form of a key fob for Internet banking transaction. In future, users will need to key in username, password and the one-time-password genearted from the security key fob for any transaction. This is in response to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's call for two-factor authentication for Internet banking in Hong Kong.

Still two more methods for two-factor authentication, One is the digital ceritifcate approach and the other is SMS-based one-time-password. For the former, the users have to renew their digital ceriticates with hongkongpost on an annual basis. As for the latter, time will be wasted in waiting for the bank to send the SMS-based one-time-password.

I think HSBC makes the best choice in adopting the security token method which brings the least inconvenience to end users.

low cost game PC station

I want to make a low-end entry-level game PC station for my son during the summer vacation. It's about HK$2073 with the following config :

1.  Asrock P4VM8 mother board                 - HK$355
2.  Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz CPU                 - HK$528
3.  Geforce 64 MB AGPx8 display card          - HK$220
4.  80G ATA-100 hard disk                     - HK$420
5.  52x Combo CD-ROM                          - HK$290
6.  256M DDR 400 RAM                          - HK$190
7.  Case and power supply                     - HK$200
8.  Floppy disk drive                         - HK$40
9.  Keyboard and mouse                        - HK$100

A licensed copy of Windows XP Home will add extra HK$700, hence the total cost amounts to HK$2773. Hmmm.., I shall make the PC available by next week.

Packetyzer

Packetyzer is a Windows user interface for the Ethereal packet analysis engine. It is built on winpcap and Ethereal but with a more powerful user interface.

In using Ethereal, I encounter a problem of setting the display filter. Packetyzer helps me to easily set display filter without memorizing the ugly syntax.

However, packetyzer can not handle a large file size. Files of captured packets in Ethereal format of up to 100 Mbyte can be handled by Ethereal without problem.

Linux and the movie Titanic"

In the movie "Titanic", all the visual effects were generated by a cluster of Linux computers :



In 1997, during the work on Titanic, the estimated computer facility required involved approximately 350 SGI CPUs, 200 DEC Alpha CPUs and 5 terabytes of disk all connected by a 100Mbps or faster network, running under the OS DEC Unix. The cost was far too prohibitive and Digital Domain turned to Linux. Finally, the configuration was made up of 160 433 MHz DEC Alpha systems, 105 were running Linux and the remaining 55 were operating Windows NT. I got a picture of the facility set up at that time:



According to Digital Domain, the low entry cost, versatility and interoperability of Linux is sufficiently attractive to warrant more extensive investigation, experimentation and deployment in the film production industry.

Safri Duo

Safri Duo plays fantastic music, good drum and percussion skills, mixed with strong electronic dance beats.

I started to hear their music last year. Frankly, I have not heard any music as enjoyable as those played by Safri Duo. If I have to rate, I must say Safri Duo is the best drum and percussion player in the world.

Here are the best songs I love :

1. Played-a-live
2. Samb-Adaigo
3. Snakefood
4. Meets Ayla Sunrise

Blog Statistics

According to the Pew Internet study, it is estimated that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly. There are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

With that amount of new web content, there must be some blog search engines tailored design to search the blogopshere. Fortunately, I find technorati and Bloogz that serve my need.

Ultra 20 workstation

Do you believe it ?

Sun microsystems has released the Ultra 20 workstation using a single-core 64-bit Opteron processor and the price is just US$895.

This is an unprecedented price for 64-bit workstation even it is an entry-level workstation.

Ha ha ha …. Shall I buy one for playing around with Solaris 10 ?

Spamcop RBL

As a further effort to reduce spam, I decided to link up my sendmail.cf with the Realtime Blocking List (RBL) of spamcop.net. This requires adding "FEATURE(`dnsbl', `bl.spamcop.net', `"Spam blocked see: http://spamcop.net')dnl" in sendmail.mc and then using m4 to recompile sendmail.mc to sendmail.cf.

The blocking capability of spamcop RBL is astonishing. Within the first day, the RBL successfully rejected over 100 junk email from suspected spam sites. The amount of spam delivered to my mail server is reduced by over 60 %.

I note that major ISPs and big companies are also using the Spamcop RBL. Wooo... Spamcop has done a great work to the Internet world.

Relay hosts by country

ORDB.org (Open Relay Database) has published the statistics of mail relay hosts of individual countries. Amongst the first 20 countries, US is ranking the top. Hong Kong is ranking 14 with about 3000 relay hosts. Are these hosts careless configured or the network administrators of these hosts purposely enable the mail relay function ? I think the answer should be the former !!

Firefox awards

Mozilla Firefox Browser continues to win several distinguished awards in the IT industry.

PC World - Product of the Year awarded in June 2005

Forbes Best of the Web awarded in May 2005

PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award, May 2005

“...Firefox is a great little browser. It's a quick download, occupies very little disk space, and has a clean, no-nonsense interface.”

Father of DNS

Dr. Paul Mockapetris, the Father of DNS, was granted the ACM Sigcomm lifetime award in May 2005.

In 1983, he foresaw the problem in the early Internet (then ARPAnet) of holding name to address translations in a single table on a single host, and instead proposed a distributed and dynamic DNS database: essentially DNS as we have it today.

Whois Search

When we want to check if an IP address 213.121.208.57 belongs to which ISP or owner, we will try whois search of one of the Network Information Centers (NIC). There are five NICs in this world handling the global IP address allocation, namely APNIC for Asia Pacific Region, ARIN (America Registry for Internet Number) for USA and Canada, RIPE for Europe, LACNIC for Latin America NIC and finally AFRINIC for African region. The IP address 213.121.208.57 belongs to a UK company, and if we try to use whois search in APNIC page, it will say hey this is not handled by me, goto RIPE. We will then goto RIPE and re-enter IP address in whois search box again and then get the registration information. This is quite inconvenient as we may need to access two NICs in order to find the registration.

At present, there is no one single NIC that stores up all the IP address allocation/registration of the whole world. Recently, I notice a site http://www.whois.sc which perform a single search for all IP address registration. I think this site will try a NIC at random, say APNIC, if APNIC says the IP should be interrogated at RIPE, it will goto there. This seems to be a great help to those who need to find IP address registration frequently.

Highest Price PCI Fibre Channel Card

This PCI Fibre Channel Card, QLogic's SANblade QLA2342, is sold at price of US$1,900, the highest price in Froogle online shopping for similar products. It offers two independent channels of 2-Gb Fiber Channel combined with 64-bit, 133-MHz PCI bus. Fbire Channel Cards are important in implementing storage area network (SAN) solutions which requires extreme high speed to store large amount of data over network interface.

40 million visa card accounts in the hands of hackers

Woo.. at last, we see the biggest criminal security breach of credit card information in history. The names, numbers and passwords for some 40 million credit card accounts appear to have been stolen from the computers of CardSystems Solutions.



How could CardSystems Solutions lose control of 40 million accounts?

A spokeman said thieves on the inside could have helped hackers to get inside, dumping viruses, or more likely, they exploited well-known vulnerabilities in the company’s computer system, using access codes that can be found on the Internet.

Apparently, CardSystems is not operating highly secure systems that meet the security levels of processing credit cards. In case of lawsuit, will the company go into bankruptcy ?

VRFY and EXPN in SMTP protocols

VRFY (verify) and EXPN (expand) commands are considered as security loopholes in SMTP. VRFY is used to check if an email address is valid. EXPN can expand an address. If the address indicates a mailing list, it return the contents of that list.

When the SMTP protocol was created, the Internet was quite a friendly place. VRFY and EXPN were convenient method of verifying email addresses. With the inceasing spam activities, people are taking the view that the two commands could be used by spammers to hunt email addresses. By all means, such information should not be given out as a matter of security and as a coordinated effort to combat spam.

Fedora Core 4

The biggest IT news in this week is the release of Fedora Core 4 by Redhat. I tried to download this latest package from Redhat but there were too many connections out there. Wow…, will use the whole Saturday and Sunday to download the 2.4 Gbytes iso files.

The package that attracts most people's attention in FC4 is Xen 2.0. Xen is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for x86-compatible computers. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, each running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native performance.

世紀性侵犯案

Michael Jackson 性侵犯兒童案已結束，以他的財力及知名度，被判無罪絕不為奇。雖然如此，換來的卻是在全球上損失大批歌迷，佷多人對他的人格都感到反感，他們絕不會再買 Micahel Jackson 的CD 唱碟。