Archive for February, 2007

GMail Mail Fetcher

// February 14th, 2007 // No Comments » // General, Tech

GMail added a new feature that lets you to fetch mail from your other, non-Gmail accounts. You’ll be able to read email from up to 5 additional accounts, all in one place, Note: The email accounts you would like to fetch will need to support POP access. Some free email services don’t support POP access at this time.

This feature is currently enabled to a limited number of users and luckily am one of them. Google has always been kind enough to include me in almost all of their new offerings as soon as they are rolled out. Thanks Google.

Steps To Access Mail From Other Accounts:

  1. Click Settings from the top of any Gmail page.
  2. Click Accounts.
  3. In the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account.
  4. Enter the full email address of the account you’d like to access, then click Next Step.
  5. Gmail will populate the Username and POP Server fields when possible, based on your email address. Enter your Password.
  6. Decide whether to:
    • Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server. If you’ll only be accessing your email through your Gmail account, leave this unchecked. If you’d like to be able to access your mail directly from that account, or if you’re accessing it through any other accounts or devices, click to select this option.
    • Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.
    • Label incoming messages. If you’d like to automatically label all messages that are retrieved from your non-Gmail account, select this option. You can choose to use the predefined label (your email address), or you can select an existing label or create a new one from the drop-down list.
    • Archive incoming messages. Mail from this account can be archived directly, without showing up in your Inbox.
  7. Click Add Account.
  8. Once your account has been added successfully, you’ll have the option of setting it as a custom From address. This allows you to compose messages in Gmail, but have them appear to be sent from your other email account. Click Yes to set up a custom From address.

You’re done! Gmail will now check your other account on a regular basis, and new mail will appear automatically in your Gmail account. You can disable importing at any time from the Accounts tab of your Settings page. Just click delete next to the appropriate email account.

This is another great feature from the already quite handy GMail service. All in all its one more reason to switch to GMail.

DivX Community Codec 6.5.1 Released

// February 11th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Tech

New Features in the latest DivX Codec:
  • Get better picture quality from MPEG-2 and live capture sources thanks to support for native PAL and NTSC pixel aspect ratios.
  • Support for two new mobile video profiles.
  • Experience lower CPU use or better deblocking during playback thanks to a 10% increase in decoder performance.

>> Download Link (For Windows) (14.8MB) <<

DivX for Windows download includes:

  • DivX Player 6.4
  • DivX Community Codec 6.5.1
  • DivX Web Player 1.3.0
  • DivX Converter 6.2 (15-day trial)
  • DivX Pro Codec 6.5.1 (15-day trial)

What I would suggest would be to install just the codec minus all other extras during the customized install. This would play all the stuff on windows media player using the installed codec. Ofcourse if you use VLC Player there is no need for you to go through all this. But still if you do a lot of encoding on your pc this is a must install for you.

Tor: The Onion Router

// February 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

Tor, an acronym for The Onion Router, is a freely available, open-source program developed by the U.S. Navy about a decade ago. Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004. The EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005 and continues to provide web hosting for the project. Its basically a browser plug-in, it thwarts online traffic analysis and related forms of Internet surveillance by sending your data packets through different routers around the world. As each packet moves from one router to the next, it is encoded with encrypted routing information, and the previous layer of such information is peeled away â€” hence the “onion” in the name.

Basically, Tor is a way to surf the Internet anonymously. Someone looking up potentially sensitive information might prefer to use it â€” like a person who is worried about potential exposure to a sexually transmitted disease and shares a computer with roommates. Abuse survivors might not want anyone else knowing they have visited Web sites for support groups related to rape or incest. Journalists in repressive regimes with state-controlled media use Tor to reach foreign online news sites, chat rooms, blogs, and related venues for information.

Like all current low latency anonymity networks, Tor is vulnerable to correlation attacks from attackers who can watch both ends of a user’s connection. Because of this, Tor is not suitable for protection against observation when the observer has access to both ends of the communication, for example a government with access to a large number of Internet service providers.

How Tor came to my notics was through an article about an University Professor, Mr. Paul Cesarini, being questioned for using Tor for academic purposes. On September 11th of 2006, Seven ISPs and individuals were raided and six confirmed computers seized by German police — but not purely for operating as anonymity proxy servers using the Tor network protocol. The premise of the seizures was that the servers showed up in a server log of a child pornography site. According to German civil liberties advocates in Germany who talked to the police, there are dozens if not hundreds of computers, in addition to the Tor nodes, that were also seized. Tor executive director, Shava Nerad, expects all the computers to be returned to the server operators, none of whom have been charged with any crime, after the servers have been cleared from any involvement in the sting. However, Nerad also cautioned, “I don’t believe German police have a deep understanding of how an anonymizing system works and none of these routers have logs.” How in the name of Hell could they find these server logs is the big question here. According to one of the Tor operators whose server was confiscated, no criminal charge has yet been filed against him.

What is it with anonymity and freedom of speech that freaks out Government, Police and other so called Security organizations that make them go to such lengths as the ones mentioned above. Aren’t they the ones that have been placed to protect the peoples right against any such infringement of freedom?

External Links:

Yahoo! Pipes

// February 9th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Tech

Pipes from Yahoo! is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant. This service lets you create mashups of various data sources available on the web and redirect output accordingly through a simple drag and drop editor. Its actually analogous to hotlinking of images only you can almost photoshop the image in the process.

The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.

I was really excited to try out the service but all I got the whole of yesterday was a lousy message saying:

Google/YouTube Videos on Orkut

// February 6th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // General

 

Now you can have your favourite videos on your orkut profile. Although this a welcome addition to many (especially those video freaks who keep uploading all those crazy videos on YouTube) any video that you want on your profile has to uploaded to either Google Videos or YouTube – BOTH incidentally owned by Google! This seems to be some sort of cheap cross promotion gimmick by google. I dont know what Orkut, the founder must be thinking now. Orkut is slowly beginning to look like one of those heavy ad filled social networking sites.

Orkut on the other hand has been silently getting better by the day in various aspects. You can see the time elapsed against each scrap apart from other features. What I want to put forward is: Is Google trying to imply that there are no other video hosting sites other than these two? As far as I’m thining one day it will integrate both Google Videos and YouTube creating a mega video site. That would totally dominate the video market.