MakeMeBabies.com, or why I will never sleep with Antonio Banderas

Posted Jun 26th 2008 3:00PM by Kristin Shoemaker
Filed under: Fun, Internet

I remember being a little girl, and watching my friends fuss about what their babies would like if they married George Michael, or Michael Jackson (so I am not only carbon-dating myself, but I'm also showing how naive my friends and I were). Oh, c'mon, I never fussed about these things. I was too busy playing with the Commodore PET.

The Commodore PET could only dream of doing the things modern computers (or little girls) do. Today, its dreams have come true with the introduction of (cough) MakeMeBabies.com. Okay, this site is for entertainment purposes only. The resulting child of any of these unions, holy, unholy, or otherwise, may not be true to life. Yet all of us here at Download Squad are wasting way too much time spreading our genes throughout Hollywood.

They'll thank us later, for sure.

The results of our fooling around (hate the game, not the playaz, guys) produced some interesting (if extremely disturbing) results. My (real life) husband and I had a blonde child that was much too good looking to have come from either of us. Never mind that neither of us are blonde. Antonio Banderas and I produced a child that had some serious facial issues. Interestingly enough, fellow Download Squad lady bloggers (why aren't the guy Squadders doing this too?) seemed to have children with similar facial issues. Actually, we all seemed to have the same child with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Antonio Banderas.

So what do you all think? One trick algorithm putting similar features on generic children's heads? Or is it a deeper conspiracy? Do all the guys in Hollywood have the same genetic structure? Are they all inbred? Or maybe... Maybe it's all of us here at Download Squad. We'll never tell.

[via Jay Martinez.com]

Torrent Relay for times when you just need to download

Posted Jun 17th 2008 11:00AM by Joey Celis
Filed under: Internet

Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools and HTML editors, Pt. 1

Posted Jun 9th 2008 7:00PM by Kristin Shoemaker
Filed under: Developer, Features, Linux, Open Source

In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.)

I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux was that there wasn't a real Dreamweaver-esque type application. Times have changed, however. There are a number of HTML/web development applications out there that are free (as in speech and beer) and feature filled.

But I'd be really amiss if I just mentioned Linux HTML editors in a vacuum. There are a number of tools readily available in repositories that make coding, layout, uploading, and testing easy and (dare I say it) fun.

Because seriously, if it isn't fun, what's the point?

Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at web development tools in Linux. We'll do a run down of some popular XHTML/HTML editors, FTP and transfer software, and neat little tools for creating content that make some of the drudgery of "back-end" web work less painful.

Continue reading Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools and HTML editors, Pt. 1

We call shenanigans: WiFi "allergies" do not exist, kiddies

Posted May 28th 2008 1:00PM by Kristin Shoemaker
Filed under: Internet, News

Over the past few days there has been increasing furor over a claim made by some "electro-sensitive" folks in Santa Fe that wifi in public buildings violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because these people are electro-sensitive (and this sensitivity can be to all sorts of electromagnetic fields, in things like cell phones, or microwaves, or, we'd imagine, things like transformer stations and circuit boxes), they can't enter public buildings due to the horrible health effects they experience. These health effects range from chest pains, to leg numbness, to shortness of breath, and headaches.

Is wifi dangerous? Are cell phones dangerous? There is some debate about various cancers that may or may not result from having a cell phone pasted to your ear and your laptop constantly humming on your lap, but most cancers don't immediately cause things like, oh, chest pain, leg numbness, or shortness of breath. The verdict is still out on long term effects at this point anyway, and we take the stance that something is eventually going to kill us. Life is too short to live in constant fear, or without an internet connection.

Panic attacks cause the above symptoms. Generalized anxiety does as well. An "allergic" reaction to wifi? Eh.

We look at it this way. Right now, we're sitting in a residential area about eight miles outside of a major city. Turning on our wireless connection and sniffing around reveals eleven wifi networks in the area. Eleven that we could in theory connect with successfully, if they are unsecured. Eleven that are not blocked by things like walls, or doors, or tinfoil hats. We are not in a business district in a city.

Can you imagine the rogue wifi signals that are shooting around Santa Fe? Do the electro-sensitive people believe that wifi respects physical boundaries, and that walking by a coffee shop or public building with wifi is different than walking into one? If so, would they walk by a coffee shop with wifi while the door was open? Would the wireless, ahem, rush out the open door? Is there any place in the US where you can be in a city, or moderately populated town, and not be in range of some wireless signal?

Continue reading We call shenanigans: WiFi "allergies" do not exist, kiddies

Nominate the best for the Flash Forward Film Festival

Posted May 9th 2008 10:00AM by Michael Schleifstein
Filed under: Design, Games, Internet, Video, Adobe

Parenting 2.0: Mom pranks son's MySpace as punishment

Posted Apr 15th 2008 9:00AM by Danny Mendez

A sassy 13 year-old Virginian laid the smack-down on a vacuum instead of doing his chores and then was caught looking at porn by his tech savvy mother, who stumbled upon some very suspicious looking cookies (not pictured above) stored on the computer's browser. Unhappy with his recent behavior, how does a mother punish a boy in this day and age?

Grounding him to his room would only be a blessing: video games, TV, the Internet, movies, phone, etc. Getting him to do chores has already proved fruitless. Perhaps in another time-period, she would've beat him into a coma with a yard stick, but today's politically correct nation requires Parenting 2.0 -- officially trademarked, copyrighted, and owned by T-Mobile.

Continue reading Parenting 2.0: Mom pranks son's MySpace as punishment

US consumers lose record amounts of money to Internet scams

Posted Apr 4th 2008 2:00PM by Simon Kerbel
Filed under: Internet, Security, News

It's like the song says, "Everybody plays the fool."

The FBI reports that US consumers lost a record 239 million dollars to Internet scammers and thieves in 2007. Given the record number of spam emails being sent (which accounted for 75% of the Internet scams), and the mass amounts of money being made by scammers worldwide, this really shouldn't surprise us; it's kind of like reporting that peanut butter goes well with jelly.

Internet scams are a hot, and a big, business.

A couple interesting tidbits:

Even though the amount lost this year was higher, the actual number of complaints was down. This means that scammers are focusing more and more on big ticked items, such as work-at-home schemes and so forth.

Continue reading US consumers lose record amounts of money to Internet scams

Want to help Azureus (Vuze) fight BitTorrent throttling ISPs?

Posted Mar 27th 2008 5:30PM by Danny Mendez
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Windows, web 2.0

If you like yourself some BitTorrent downloading action, we recommend you help Azureus fight BitTorrent throttling ISPs like Comcast, Adelphia, SusCom, and others by installing the Network Status Monitor plug-in for Azureus / Vuze. The plug-in monitors your network traffic for anything that might prohibit your computer from utilizing its broadband connection to the fullest.

Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.

If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.

Googleholic for March 11, 2008

Posted Mar 11th 2008 5:00PM by Romeo Wahed
Filed under: Features, Google, Googleholic

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Welcome to Google Town, er, Nanaimo
• Google stock dips to 52-week low
• "How Google keeps your information secure"
• Slow loading sites will get penalized by Adwords

Welcome to Google Town, er, Nanaimo

If you thought Mountain View was the town of Google, take a look at Nanaimo, British Columbia. The town has mapped almost everything about itself on Google, including lot sizes of properties, business information, zoning information, and stuff like the real-time position of fire trucks in the city. The place even has its own RSS feed that can alert people to accident sites. Considering that the town only has a population of 78,000, the cataloging of just about "everything" that can be captured electronically is naturally easier than it may be in a sprawling metropolis, but Nanaimo may very well set a precedent in how much information we may be able to access online about any town. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Continue reading Googleholic for March 11, 2008

Question Box brings info from Internet to village with one button

Posted Mar 4th 2008 7:00PM by Jay Hathaway
Filed under: News

Rose Shulman and the Open Mind foundation are tackling the problem of bringing information access to areas too physically or politically remote to sustain an Internet connection. The project is called Question Box, and it consists of one button and a speaker. Users in remote villages can push the button and have their questions answered by a multilingual operator with Internet access.

Open Mind has teamed up with National Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi to install two Question Boxes so far, in India's Ethida and Poolpur villages (roughly near New Delhi). The units are centrally located, near shops where they'll get the most use. Residents of the villages have already asked about topics as diverse as cricket scores, university exam results, and how to get a personal loan.

Question Box will expand as it gains funding, and hopes to allow villagers to dial the system from their home telephones. We think this is a fantastic idea: information should be available to people whether their infrastructure allows for an Internet connection or not. Look for Question Box to keep breaking down language and technology barriers in the future.

[via BoingBoing]

As malicious code increases, so does confidence in Internet security

Posted Feb 7th 2008 10:00AM by Romeo Wahed
Filed under: Internet, Security

Baseline put up an interesting piece about a Cisco Systems survey showing that "56 percent of remote workers using enterprise PCs to access the Internet say their perception of Internet security increased." Which, interestingly enough, is at a time when malicious code threats are on the rise, according to, at least, this Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (PDF).

Granted, the Symantec source may not be totally unbiased, but the reported rise of malicious code being up 185% in the first 6 months of 2007 compared to the last 6 months of 2006, would suggest that any confidence in security getting better is largely based on perception alone.

Apparently, the big reason why remote workers have a heightened confidence in Internet security is because they are not responsible for the security on their enterprise machines, since someone else is technically in charge of it. That, bundled with a mass migration of services such as banking to the Internet, seems to give people false confidence that the Internet is getting "safer."

But what are the perceptions of Internet security for the average end user? With some recommending to stop using antivirus software altogether due to lack of stopping power and drain on processing performance, are we being naive when using the Internet for sensitive transactions? Maybe, but it's interesting to see how marketing for security software and new uses for the Internet are giving it an aura of safety beyond what is perhaps merited.

Or maybe we've got it all wrong, and Internet security is indeed getting better despite an influx of malicious code.

[via Slashdot]

IPv6 coming to a root server near you

Posted Feb 5th 2008 10:30AM by Todd Ritter
Filed under: Internet

IPv6 authoritative nameserver records are in the process of being added to six of the world's thirteen DNS root servers. Root servers are the computers at the top of the DNS hierarchy that are crucial in helping you turn downloadsquad.com into an IP address for your computer's benefit. This change means that networks using IPv6 will be able to use the root servers to resolve Internet hostnames without using IPv4.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the future successor of IPv4. IPv6 is becoming increasingly necessary as the world runs out of IPv4 addresses (like 100.10.1.1). IPv6 has a much larger address space since it uses 128bits per address instead of 32bits like IPv4.

Unlike IPv4 where you're often provided one public IP address that you have to share with many devices, IPv6 eliminates common network configuration headaches like network-address translation (think: port forwards) since everything in your house from your computer to your Xbox to your Tivo could have a unique public IP address.

[Via BBC News]

RulesofThumb.org - All the little rules in one place

Posted Jan 25th 2008 11:00AM by Romeo Wahed
Filed under: Fun, Internet

RulesofThumb.org is an online collection of little rules and guidelines that make life a little easier. If you enjoy nuggets such as " you should be able to run 50 miles per week on a regular basis before you try running a marathon," "avoid using all capital letters. They slow reading speed and take 30 percent more space than lower-case letters," and " when trying to screw in a fastener, remember the old adage Righty-tighty / lefty-loosey," you will find yourself right at home.

The site is a project of the author behind the books "Rules of Thumb" and "Rules of Thumb 2," and more than just a mere collection, it is designed as a peer-reviewed online repository of rules of thumb. Anyone can contribute, but the submissions will be put before the scrutiny of the community, as new rules of thumb have to get a number of positive ratings before they are added to the main collection.

Unfortunately, the interface and "searchability" of the rules leave something to be desired. Although there is a "featured" rule, there is no way to see the top or most popular rules - trying to organize search results by rank will only cause them to rank from the lowest on up (we actually paged all the way through to find the one with the highest rating - it is the above mentioned "when trying to screw in a fastener..."). If the site had a little bit more Web 2.0 usability and fleshed out the social aspect, it definitely wouldn't hurt.

Despite these details, if you're looking for guidelines to help you buy the freshest artichoke or estimate the temperature by listening to crickets, Rules of Thumb is definitely worth a peek.

[via AppScout]

ICANN aims to end U.S. oversight

Posted Jan 25th 2008 10:00AM by Romeo Wahed
Filed under: Internet

The group that is in charge of the Internet addressing system, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has sent a response (PDF) to the U.S. Department of Commerce in a midterm review of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the two parties, saying that the JPA has fulfilled its purpose and is no longer necessary.

The original agreement was put in place to get ICANN on its way to be a responsible, transparent entity to get it out of U.S. control, since this has been a topic of debate since the inception of ICANN. The report states that ICANN has already met its responsibilities of the JPA, and as such is ready for full "private sector leadership" where all the stakeholders are represented. As such, it also aims to cast off the misconception that the U.S. government is overseeing the DNS on a "daily basis."

Although this is unlikely to affect end-user interaction in any way, it will be nice to know that the root addressing system will not be under the direct control of a single entity - that is, if the U.S. Department of Commerce agrees and the JPA is indeed retired early. But considering that it is in private hands, even with stakeholders represented, it does make one wonder how it will affect competition considering that ICANN virtually has a monopoly whether it is under the oversight of the U.S. or a private group of stakeholders.

[via OSNews, ArsTechnica]

GlobalPandora: The box is ope- er, broken.

Posted Jan 19th 2008 3:40PM by Romeo Wahed
Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Last Sunday we told you about a way for listeners outside of the US to tune in to Pandora without having to deal with proxies: GlobalPandora. We also predicted that it will get shut down - but who would have thought so soon? It looks like the real Pandora decided to block all the U.S. IPs that GlobalPandora was using.

On the site, there's no hint that GlobalPandora is planning on making a comeback besides asking if anyone has "access to U.S. servers or U.S. shells." So unless there are some friendlies out there that will support GlobalPandora, the box will remain shut unless you mind setting up your own proxy.

And if you don't want to deal with a proxy, despite Pandora being as fascinating as it is, there is a nice selection of other online radio alternatives that might work for users outside of the U.S. - a number of which GlobalPandora has been good enough to list on it's "we're down" page.

• Finetune
• Jango
• Spotify
• Songza
• SHOUTcast
  

Thanks Andrew!

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