Today's Hackers o Intro - Letter style .............................. 1 o Media - how they report/expose the computer world . 2 o Hackers' of today ................................. 3 o Ending ............................................ 4 o Intro - Letter style Hello, I just want to state that this article only reflects my opinion, no blackbox or blacksun members, since you might relate me to them, state their opinion in this article, so it's possible that their ideas and opinions might diverge from mine. If you have any problem at all regarding this article, the first flaming post should be attacking me and only me. After setting this straight, here is what I'll try to discuss in the few lines written below, the way the media exploits the computer world and the way they use the word hacker and finally the hackers of today. Anyway, I think everyone will agree with what I'll be writing here, if you are one of the those persons, I just ask you to stop for a while and think about what I'm saying. Try to understand it, because I'm open to hear your opinion and discuss it with you. And I'll definitely not give you a lecture about the subject, I'll keep this straight, small and simple as an opinion should be. My best wishes to the readers, P. Abrantes AKA Ghost_Rider o Media - How they report/expose the computer world We can't deny that the media rules the masses. If someone is seen as fraud by the media, even if not being one, the chances to get their life up and running again is really reduced. In a way that also happens in the computer world, the world that many of us spend hours in due to our passion for it. How many times a journalist with little or no experience on the subject wrote an article for a newspaper or a magazine talking about the problems over the Internet "fear the hackers...they'll steal your credit card #", "Hacker Group crashed 1000 computers putting company X in financial troubles"... The word hacker is misused, I'm aware that I'm not the first person to write about that, but I won't be the last. Hackers are now seen as cyber-thieves, terrorists and the worst scum you can imagine... Everything because in the headlines we see Hackers, instead of crackers. If you prefer black-hat hackers, I think the last term is better, since the Black and White forces show up everywhere, when you have the power to do something you can get corrupted and use it to do harm, or in the other hand you can just keep in the "white side" and make things go further... But what we have to face is that black, white, gray, X colored hat hackers, those guys are the ones that make our world move. Those are the ones that discover new things, get new protocols working, correct the bugs that we might find in programs. If it weren't for the hackers heck, we wouldn't even have Linux (hey I just pick this like an example, BSD and other *nix variants don't come flamming me for this) not even Unix. But nooooo, the media said "hackers are bad guys they don't deserve any merit, they are scum" so that's the way people see them. Unfortunately, this situation tends not to change, since such writers won't get informed about how things really work and also because the persons they mostly talk to think that they are hackers, are the so-called script kiddies that are the ones looking for fame... The ones that only have to click a mouse to cause a DoS because it's coolll... What can we do, teach the journalists? But hey, even if they really start knowing what's happening, where's the sensationalism that they need in their articles? They would keep with the old head lines because it's what it sells, "14 stup

Most browser are packed with many plugins, extensions, toolbars that you don`t really need. Often times, they slow down your internet browsing speed and performance. Let me present you great useful tips to keep your Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers up to speed. Disable plugins and extensions directly from your browser Let’s start by pointing out the main differences between plugins and extensions. What is a Plugin? A plugin is a third party library that attaches itself to the browser. It can be embedded inside a web page, in which case it will work only in that specific web page. Examples of common plugins: Flash, Java, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple Quicktime, Adobe Reader. What is an Extension? Extensions, or “add-ons,” can add onto the browser user interface and process pages that the browser loads. Although you might think they are similar, in fact extensions are not the same as plugins; they affect the web browser itself, as well as the page. Some examples of important or necessary add-ons include: Adblock Plus, Firebug, Microsoft .NET framework Assistant. Below you will find instructions on how to remove or disable unnecessary plugins and extensions for Google Chrome and, Mozilla Firefox. For Google Chrome: Open Google Chrome and click the Chrome menu on the browser toolbar. Click Tools. Select Extensions. Click the trash can icon by the extension you'd like to completely remove. When the confirmation dialog appears, click Remove. You can also temporarily turn off an extension by disabling it on the Extensions page. For Mozilla Firefox: At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button, and then click on Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager tab will open. In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Extensions or Appearance panel. Select the add-on you wish to disable. Click its Disable button. Click Restart now if prompted. Your tabs will be saved and restored after the restart. Return to the Add-ons menu and select the Plugins panel. Select the plugin you wish to disable. Select Never Activate in its drop-down menu. Clear browsing cache and cookies This process is necessary because of the amount of data stored by your browser, which is pretty much unnecessary used up space. Your browser has a folder in which certain items that have been downloaded are stored for future access. Graphic images (buttons, banners, icons or graphs), photographs, and even entire web pages are examples of cache items. When going to a page on a website, your computer will check its cache folder first to see if it already has those images stored, and, if so, it won't need to download them again. This makes for faster loading. Cache folders can get quite large and can occupy over 100 MB of hard drive space, storing graphics for sites you may never visit again. In case you are concerned with your privacy or storage capacity, it may be wise to empty the cache periodically. That will also enable the browser to access updated web pages without the older cache item interfering. To empty the cache of your internet browsers, follow the next steps: For Google Chrome: Open Google Chrome Click on the Chrome menu on the browser toolbar. Select Tools. Select Clear browsing data. In the dialog check the boxes for the types of information that you want to remove (Clear browsing history, Clear download history, Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data, Empty the cache – these are checked by default, and it is recommended to keep them checked) Use the dropdown menu at the top of the window to select the amount of data that you want to delete. Select the beginning of time to delete everything. Click Clear browsing data. For Mozilla Firefox: Open Mozilla Firefox At the top of the Firefox window, click o

Bit Torrent Tutorials The first things you need to know about using Bit Torrent: -- Bit Torrent is aimed at broadband users (or any connection better than dialup). -- Sharing is highly appreciated, and sharing is what keeps bit torrent alive. -- A bit torrent file (*.torrent) contains information about the piece structure of the download (more on this later) -- The method of downloading is not your conventional type of download. Since downloads do not come in as one big chunk, you are able to download from many people at once, increasing your download speeds. There may be 100 "pieces" to a file, or 20,000+ pieces, all depending on what you're downloading. Pieces are usually small (under 200kb) -- The speeds are based upon people sharing as they download, and seeders. Seeders are people who constantly share in order to keep torrents alive. Usually seeders are on fast connections (10mb or higher). In this tutorial, I will be describing it all using a bit torrent client called Azureus. This client is used to decode the .torrent files into a useable format to download from other peers. From here on out, I will refer to Bit Torrent as BT. Which BT client you use, is purely up to you. I have tried them all, and my personal favorite is Azureus for many reasons. A big problem with most BT clients out there, is that they are extremely CPU intensive, usually using 100% of your cpu power during the whole process. This is the number one reason I use Azureus. Another, is a recently released plug-in that enables you to browse all current files listed on suprnova.org (the #1 source for torrent downloads). Before you use the plug-in, take a look at /http://www.suprnova.org, and browse the files. Hold your mouse over the links, and you'll notice every file ends in .torrent. This is the BT file extension. Usually, .torrent files are very small, under 200kb. They contain a wealth of information about the file you want to download. A .torrent file can contain just 1 single file, or a a directory full of files and more directories. But regardless, every download is split up into hundreds or thousands of pieces. The pieces make it much easier to download at higher speeds. Back to suprnova.org. Look at the columns: Added | Name | Filesize | Seeds | DLs (and a few more which aren't very useful.) I'll break this down. Added: Self explanitory, its the date the torrent was added. Name: Also self explanitory. Filesize: Duh Seeds: This is how many people are strictly UPLOADING, or sharing. These people are the ones that keep .torrent files alive. By "alive", I mean, if there's no one sharing the .torrent file, no one can download. DLs: This is how many people currently downloading that particular torrent. They also help keep the torrent alive as they share while they download. It's always best to download using a torrent that has a decent amount of seeders and downloaders, this way you can be assured there's a good chance your download will finish. The more the better. Now that you should understand how torrent files work, and how to use them, on to Azureus! First, get JAVA! You need this to run Azureus, as java is what powers it. Get Java here: /http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html Next, get Azureus at: /http://azureus.sourceforge.net Next, get the Suprnovalister plugin from /http://s93732957.onlinehome.us/storage/suprnovalister.jar Install Java JRE before you do ANYTHING. Install Azureus, and then in the installation folder, create 2 more folders. ./Plugins/suprnovalister (For example, if you installed Azureus to C:\PROGRAM FILES\AZUREUS, create C:\PROGRAM FILES\AZUREUS\PLUGINS\SUPRNOVALISTER). Next, put the suprnovalister.jar file that you downloaded, in that folder. Load up Azureus, and if you want, go through the settings and personalize it. The tab labeled "My Torrents" is the section of Azur

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This is well written explanation about bandwidth, very useful info. BandWidth Explained Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet. Network Connectivity The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet. If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54). Traffic A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up. Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters - A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB). If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example, the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person's file transf