When visiting youhavedownloaded.com it will show you what you may have downloaded via torrent recently.

You may also enter an IP address to see what others may be downloading. The goal of this site seems to make it clear to users what information about them is actually publicly available.

People at torrentfreak have found that Sony, Universal and Fox like torrents.

Guess who else likes torrents ? Check out Nicolas Sarkozy's home IP and another Elysee IP (The French presidential home has 62.160.71.0/24, so you can check for others).

Over the past 10 years or so the entertainment industry has been whining about losing money because of the Internet. Of course it is (most probably) false. The crazy thing isn't the bitching, it's the desire to have full control of human communication, over the Internet at least.

I am so tired of them that it is unbelievable, the only reason these people have any power is because people actually buy their products and hence provide them with a neat fortune.

From here on I am going to go out of my way to not purchase anything that provides them with income. I am already not a big client of theirs, however it can happen that I legally watch a movie or buy a movie merchandise, that's done.

I do not support the "Entertainment Industry" (anymore at least), I would like to see them disappear for good. I am not afraid of not being entertained.

The other day I saw this presentation about Convergence, it is a system designed to avoid using your browser's built-in CA (certificate authorities) for authenticating SSL certificates. Marlin talks about how the system is broken and how Comodo fails etc etc. Then goes on about various systems like certificates in DNS (I had a similar idea), but apparently they are vulnerable to DNS attacks..

Of course, I hate commercial CAs, they have no place on the Internet and have done nothing good for anyone, ever. (maybe a bit strong, but still). And of course browser vendors have sold their trust (and souls (if applicable)) to any CA available while still making you freak out when you reach a self signed certificate.. So of course I tried out Convergence, I even set up a notary (of course). After a couple of hours testing I came up with some pros and cons:

Pros

• Remove CAs from the equation

Cons

• Some sites do not seem to work, even Google (Citibank site effect, but for people outside the U.S.A. (yes, they exist)
• Slow. I have to connect to as many notaries as I have configured and compare data retrieved for each.. . slow.
• Problems with LAN sites, or sites protected by IP etc etc (sites that cannot be accessed by notaries)
• If the certificate is compromised and (hence) changed, you could be subject to hijacking as your convergence plugin will not re-query the notaries (unless you un-check the "use cache" option.. extra slow)
• DNS attacks are still possible, because most people will be using the default notaries anyway.. Which if this happens is worse then the average MITM as this would compromise ALL SSL connections !
• Crashes Firefox (but that is easily fixable I am sure)
• The "view certificate" function shows me "Convergence Local CA" and not the actual certificate of the website I am viewing, one has to go somewhere in the options to verify this.. this sucks.
• This is useless if the MITM is happening between the server and the Internet, actually, if everyone was using Convergence MITM attacks on a server's IP would now be easier to do, no need to trick Comodo into selling you certificate for someone else's domain.

As you can guess I stopped using this plugin about a few hours later. I also lost that sense of security when visiting my websites (webmail and all those things) as I have my own CA and/or know my certificates hashes, with Convergence I am lost.

I like the motivation behind Convergence (and Perspectives) but it simply appears to be totally broken. I could be missing something and would be glad to hear about it. After testing convergence I think that SSL without CAs using DNS is still a better option.

I also believe that as far as DNS poisoning goes, I do not understand why everyone doesn't have a local resolver, even and especially on laptops on the go.

Today I discovered PhpTop and I must say it looks really cool. This will show Php processes like top.

To install, you can either get the .deb packages or just download the binary (which I did to try out first), and add this to your php.ini (I personally added this to /etc/php5/conf.d/phptop.ini which seems to work as well): auto_prepend_file=/path/to/phptop_hook.php And voilà.

You can even output to HTML and hence generate a nice web page... .

Herman Cain on foreign policy.. More specifically on the subject of Libya.

Herman Cain mocks Uzbekistan calling it Uzbeki Beki Beki Beki Stan Stan and points out he doesn't care to know much about anything outside his electrified fence.

Now the question is: "How does our society let someone like that even get close to anything related to public responsibility ?"

Today I heard about OEmbed, my first reaction was to implement it, of course ! The idea is to define a way of providing a page preview. Say you post a link on a microblog or something, the said microblog or something can visit the link, figure out what the resource is to obtain the preview, or OEmbed version (embeddable), and then chose to display that preview. Neat.

For it to work you need what they call an OEmbed provider, A provider is another service that will return the summary (JSON, XML or HTML). Apparently the client could specify the format they want the reply in.. To get the provider it seems there is a list of "well known providers" !! This means you take your link and ask the provider (another url) to transform your initial link into an OEmbed formatted something.... . FAIL !!11!!1.

Another thing is discovery, now this is a good thing, obviously, to put in the header a link to get the OEmbed version of the page, like RSS maybe ? The stupid part is that it requires that the link contains a url GET parameter, that supposes that instead of just providing a link to a OEmbed happy version of the page you MUST provide a "OEmbed provider link" that will take the URL of the page you are visiting, parse it and.. . BROKEN.

Why can't it just be an alternate link ?

Of course there are 3rd party providers now, and that is exactly what we don't need... It's so simple to generate a JSON or XML file that why would anyone ever think of a 3rd party web site whose role it would be to scrape your site to then provide a.. .OMG BROKEN.

As the idea is good but the implementation sucks why not simplify it, lets say we either use HEAD, like Jared Hanson and Vitorio Miliano pointed out in May 2008, or just use an alternate link a la RSS feed. If it's simple and easy for everyone to implement it will work.

Everybody loves Firefox, they are your friends, they are the "resistance", the alternative.. . the Free browser and all that crap. Yet, they somehow have started to annoy me to a point where I almost considered using Google Chrome... heck, I might just. :] (kidding!)

Here are just a couple of #$!%U*&ing things that annoyed me today..

Right Click -> New Tab: Gone

I'm not alone here, there are others annoyed by this as well. Please click on "I have this problem too" (if applicable).

Why remove such a simple ergonomically correct menu item ? People used it, they just broke it. (You can install a plugin that includes that functionality).

64bit ? But You Have to Look for it

Nowadays many computers have 64bit processors, so you can often use 64bit operating systems and enjoy 64bit programs. Cool. Some programs are not available in 64bit mode, that's fine but Firefox is available in 64bits since 4.0 .. However, you cannot easily find it. I've even found some tips on how to get the Firefox to run using ia32-libs, libraries to run 32bit programs on 64bit platforms !!

Funny thing is, while clicking through the "Need Download Help" button I found myself searching for 64 bit Firefox, the first result is "Uninstalling Firefox".

Anyway, if you still don't hate Firefox (or, like me, it's the browser you hate the least), you can get your 64 bit version from the Mozilla FTP site.. (of course this link was found somewhere on some forum or something... maybe some other rant).

The other day I upgraded my computer, I went from my 6 and a half year old laptop to a 4 year old desktop, and wow that's an impressive upgrade. Anyway, my username changed, hence the path to my photos has changed too, and Digikam stores that info in its internal DB (sqlite). Even if you copy your digicamrc file and your photos, and the digikam4.db database you might have to edit the db yourself to let it know the new path.. This is not as complicated as it may sound.

You can use sqlitebrowser for exampe. On Debian: apt-get install sqlitebrowser Then open your digikam4.db (wherever it may be): sqlitebrowser digikam4.db and edit the path, "specificPath". Images may help, so voila:

Go to the Browse Data tab, look at the specificData row.

Double click to edit the the cell and correct the value to your new path. Don't forget to "save" the database changes, you should be all set. ... the volume identifier (in my case at least) will be updated by Digikam.

Note: It took about 25 minutes for Digikam to start after these edits, but since it works totally normally.

Hopefully there could/should be a tool in a newer version of Digikam to add a tool to help with this.. Anyway, if this helps you today, that cool. : ]

Over the past couple of days Jag and I have set up a little special page that gathers aircraft data in a most beautiful way. Check out air traffic contrlol. For some explanations, read on.

This is data captured by a radar then decoded using a GPL program, ADS-B decoder written by Meinolf Braeutigam and edited by Jag. Jag captures the data as he lives near London Heathrow, then feeds it to my database and then our page displays it to you...

The colors are based on the ICAO of each aircraft, they use hexadecimal web color compatible code which we in turn use to color each flight.. which means that each aircraft has it's own unique color.

I've been helping a friend with some projects of his, mostly websites and email. Very simply put, as I'm trying to host his stuff I need to set things up on my servers, this is supposed to be the "long" part, and then just edit a couple of DNS records... easy peasy.

The difficult part commenced when I tried to simply change an IP and perhaps add an MX record for one of his domains.. I logged in to NameSecure's crappy interface, I edited the record, again and again and nothing changes.. Well, maybe after about 10/15 minutes of trying it did, however the SOA was not aware of any modifications, even 3 days later !

Do this for 3 domains and you start to get a headache.

So I write to their support and ask them to apply the changes I need, to which they reply to my friend that it can take up to 96 hours... of course they are just brushing the ticket away and throwing words about propagation (of course I don't care about propagation, I ask the SOA directly when I'm checking this sort of thing). But still, nothing works anyway. A mess.

Namesecure sucks. You shouldn't take only my word, just search the Interweb and see for yourself. Or worse, register a domain that is critical to you with them.

Solution: Move to a real registrar. Your domain name is important, it should be registered with a real registrar made of real people who know how to actually do things.. One that gives you a real interface in which you can add records, press submit and magically it's there on the screen, it's like you didn't just waste your time. An example of a good company that can manage domain names properly is Gandi.net. It just works. It's quite amazing that there are so many "domain name companies", and I really mean MANY, that simply do not work and/or are totally crappy.

Anyway, the first and most important word on their website is "cheap", that means a lot.