Tag Archives: technology

The File Solution

Imagine a situation where you want to share large amounts of data among people who are located around the universe. All are sufficiently wired so no worries about connections and probably no worries about bandwidth (but we can always want more). How to go about this?

Among the slightly inconvenient methods I currently use are FTP (via traditional clients, IM), e-mail, and, for when I am connecting to my other machines, remote connections (e.g., Remote Desktop Connection and VNC). There are others, yes; the point of this post is not to methodically go through every way to remedy the hypothetical situation but to highlight two relevant applications about which I just learned.

The first new method is through a Firefox plugin called AllPeers. It works within Firefox and establishes a p2p network among a defined set of users. You can do the basic nifty things with it (for a quick but comprehensive run down, watch the demo). For sharing large amounts of data and in situations where you want users to pull or push the data (i.e., copy to and from), it does not seem to be an ideal solution.

A better solution might be Hamachi, which I just learned about from BH. It creates a VPN’ed LAN. I went through the site’s primary pages and it looks solid, providing a basic solution with some nice frills. Support for Windows is decent–I am talking about the GUI and features, not necessarily stability or completion of the software; it’s in beta–and Linux and OS X progress is, well, progressing. Check it out.

Some Recent Cool Tech Articles

I recently started my new job and some other activities so I’m way behind on posting and Web surfing. I caught up today (1000+ unreads in RSS; 30 unread e-mails from today; hitting my usual daily Web site reading list, etc.).

In catching up, I’ve come across some cool tech articles:

– Nokia preps phones for Web serving (via /.; start screaming Ben)

– Prevent Thumbs.db (for Windows users)

– I like robot sports for some reason; this one is golf

– If you still haven’t RSSed this, you’re asking for it

Encrypting Communications

Between 733t h4x0r5 and the government, it has long been my desire to better secure my communications.

Recent stories on our corporate friends unquestioningly cooperating with our government friends re-fueled my fire. Thankfully, I have some extra time to read up and play with the technologies.

E-mail-wise, I use SSL, so good for me. I would like to also use PGP but almost no one does this, even the geeks I know.

IM wise, I used Adium‘s built-in privacy features to encrypt communications and installed a GAIM plug-in that does the same. While both installs were easy, I know the average Joes and Ivans will have trouble trying to figure out how to have IM conversations with me. Too bad for them.

I read up on Skype’s encryption. Interestingly, they use excellent methods and reap plenty of praise for their efforts, but no one seems to notice that they admittedly fulfill every government request, making this article’s headline funny/odd. So you may be safe from Mr. Pwn3d and Osama, but not from the NSA.