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Contact info: | Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/geekcast | TheGeekcast.com | geekcast@gmail.com | Skype & Gizmo: Geekcast | 206-98-geek-1 | Show notes: send blank e-mail to geekcastpodcast-subscribe@yahoogroups.com | Frappr Map: Frappr.com/thegeekcast
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Items of Note:
Winners for The Geekcast contest:
The grand prize winner is Dave, who hosts the Thunderbird Six podcast, to which I was a guest on a few months ago.
The second place winner is Glen who wrote a great review of The Geekcast over in the canadian iTunes podcasting section.
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Tech news:
Rumors of Apple movie store resurface. Variety has posted an update on negotiations between Hollywood execs and Apple on the rumored iTunes Movie Store. According to the report, negotiations are still ongoing with Hollywood executives. Movie studios are debating how much power to give Jobs, who recently was successful in strong-arming music executives into sticking to a flat $.99 pricing model per song. Movie execs are hoping to have a tiered model, whereas Jobs is insisting that movies be sold at $9.99 each.
TiVo developing pay-per-view via broadband. TiVo is working to develop a system to securely distribute and monetize Pay Per View and Video On Demand programming. TiVo filed patents that refer to purchasing MPEG-2 downloads. There are descriptions of PPV and subscription methods for purchasing content, and the content is securely tied to the MAC address of your DVR’s network adapter. The patents were filed in November.
86% of all email traffic is spam. According to Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini, a messaging security firm based in San Carlos, Calif “The sheer volume of IM attacks is a dramatic demonstration that we’re in an environment where hackers, knowing that most organizations are still unprotected against IM malware, are rapidly adopting IM for their attacks.” Nearly every e-mail consumers receive is considered spam, either malicious or simply “unwanted content”.
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Test a geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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How To: Cancel any service.
When working with technology, there are plenty of times that you need to cancel a service you don’t want. Some companies are notorious about making you jump through hoops to cancel. AOL will not cancel your service unless you tell them why you are canceling, while others will throw every low price at you just to get your business just a bit longer. According to the guys over at the Consumerist, getting your service cancelled is as simple as these four steps:
1. Call outside of normal business hours, when most retention people are asleep. You may get a low-level CSR who doesn’t get paid to retain you.
2. If the rep is rude or unreasonable, hang up and call right back and get a different rep.
3. Tell them you’re moving. Moving outside their service area.
4. The reps are paid to retain you. Threats won’t work. Keep your head cool and dance their little dance, politely.
By going through these steps you will have a greater chance of getting your service cancelled easily. Also calling during odd hours will lower your hold time in a lot of cases.
Enjoy audio of a man calling to cancel AOL.
Info via lifehacker.com
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Hack: How to run TOR on OsX.
If you want your web traffic to be completely anonymous while online, there is a great method to do this. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has released a program called TOR. TOR is a proxy that allows you to have all your network traffic funnel through multiple nodes to completely anonomize your traffic. If you have a mac, TOR is easy to set up and use. Best of all you can turn it off and on as you wish.
First you need to download and install TOR. You can get the software for free from http://tor.eff.org. Once the software is on your system, run the installer. It is important to run the customized installation so you can select the option to not install the startup client. You don’t want TOR to run all the time.
Once the software is installed, it’s time to configure your mac. The best way to work this is to create a new location in your Network area. By creating a new location, we can control when we want to use TOR and when we don’t. Name the new location TOR and then be sure you’re selected on that as the active location. Click into the Proxies area of the Built-in Ethernet area and turn on the following proxies: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and Gopher. All proxies should point to 127.0.0.1 using port 8118. At this point the mac is set.
Now that the mac is configured, the software has to run. TOR installs 2 programs: TOR and Privoxy. Privoxy is a proxy client designed to work with TOR and funnel all traffic through the tunnel it has established. TOR establishes what is needed for the actual connection to take place. The easiest way to turn the software on and off is to create 2 aliases and copy a program file. Go to Mac HD > Library. You will see a folder for Privoxy. There will be 2 files in here called StartPrivoxy.command and StopPrivoxy.command. Create an alias for these and drop those into your Applications folder. In the TOR folder in the same location, copy the TOR file into your Applications folder.
At this point your system is ready to go. A reboot would be wise now, just to preserve any settings. After the system is back up, follow these steps to activate TOR:
1. In the Apple menu, select Location > TOR. This changes your mac to use TOR settings.
2. In your Applications folder, run the TOR executible. This will launch the Terminal and let you know when the tunnel has been established.
3. Run the alias for starting privoxy. This will redirect all traffic to the established TOR tunnel.
At this point, every application your computer will run through TOR. Safari, iTunes and any other application that utilizes the OsX network settings will run fine and not have an issue. You don’t need to configure each program to work.
You can verify you’re running through TOR by opening Safari and going to http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ipaddr.pl?tor=1 This will clearly state if you’re running TOR or not.
Now that TOR is set, you have full anonymous surfing on your computer. Azureus is a bittorrent client that can take advantage of TOR because it’s built right in, but any client should work with these settings. Please note that the EFF does stress not to use P2P software on TOR as it slows down the entire network.
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The geek’s view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Related Episodes:
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