The How To Geek Website published a Wireshark tutorial that can be useful to learn to start using this powerful network tool.

How to Use Wireshark to Capture, Filter and Inspect Packets – How-To Geek via kwout

Here is a very good infographic that explains HTTP server header response. The full infographic is available after the jump.

Server Headers 101 (Infographic) via kwout

BBC reported a brief Facebook outage yesterday. I was just curious about the way Facebook communicated on the outage. I didn’t find any formal information on their blog for instance. I just found this 30 Min. gap of service in their Platform Live Status page:

Platform Live Status – Facebook Developers via kwout

Chris palmer’s presentation at Web 2.0 expo gives some advices to maintain high performance while using HTTPS.
And I like specially the introduction slide

High Performance, Low Cost, and Strong Security: Pick Any Three: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, March 31 – April 03, 2009, San Francisco, CA

I found this map of the Internet on Wikipedia. It is based on early 2005 data. It is stated in the Wikipedia description:

This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005.

Image:Internet map 1024.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via kwout

Lifehacker blog published a very useful post, that lists the options available to protect privacy when using Bittorrent:

• Use PeerGuardian IP-Blocking application: This is not a bullet proof solution, as people or organizations monitoring the network could use any IP address. Anyway it’s a first level of protection.
• Use Tor or SSH Proxy to hide P2P communication: This solution works only with public trackers. Admins of private trackers usually bans users with such configurations as a user is identified by its IP address and with Tor the IP address changes all the time and is not the true user IP address.
• Use BTGuard: It’s a proxy hosted in Canada. You just have to configure your bittorrent client to route all the communication to this proxy. This service costs about $7/month.

Feature: Protect Your Privacy When Downloading via kwout

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, Privacy, Download, Proxy, Security

File Dropper is a new file hosting service that offers 5 GB of free storage. This service looks simple: It’s 2 steps process, first upload your file, and second share your personal link. And the service is supposed to be less annoying than Rapidshare , as their about page states:

FileDropper.com was created as a fresh alternative to sites like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Unlike those sites, we do not reel the user in and make them wait for annoying countdown timers. We do not hide the download link with aggressively placed ads.

File Dropper – The Simplest File Hosting Website Ever via kwout

Proogly is a new anonymous web based proxy:

Proogly Proxy via kwout

I tested this web based anonymous proxy and it is quite fast. At least faster than TOR. Web based anonymous proxies are not a new thing on the Internet. But Proogly integrates Web 2.0/Ajax features (ability to hide almost completely the banner, disable javascript and images, …) that are displayed in the top banner:

Tor: anonymity online via kwout

Identificateurs Technorati : Proxy, security, Web, Anonymity

Alec Saunders published an interesting post that describes how to do some quick data mining with Facebook. The starting point is to click on the advertisers link at the bottom of any Facebook page. Follow the steps as described by Alec up to the audience choice. That’s where the data mining can be done. For instance  Facebook reports that there are 1,053,740 people located in France:

If more accuracy is required, we may select only women. There are  319,600  Women located in France:

We can do the same for Men. There are 321,440 men located in France.

There are slightly more men, but there is almost a perfect balance between men and women. The strange thing is if we add Men + Women located in France, we get 641,040 (and not 1,053,740). This means that about 400,000 people didn’t complete the sex information in their profile. This point shows the limit of accuracy of Facebook data mining.

Another interesting finding is the difference between single and married people. There are 166,280 Singles.

And there are 56,540 married people.

We can explain the fact that there are more single people because there are more young people (under 25 so not married yet). It will be interesting to check those figures in a few months to see how the network evolves.

Digital inspiration published a useful tip to check if your computer is connecting to the INTERNET without your knowledge.  Of course in most case a firewall properly configured should notify any unexpected connection to the INTERNET. But in some special case, the method proposed by Digital inspiration is useful to track what’s going on in the background. The method is reproduced below:

1. Type cmd in your Windows Run box.

2. Type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C.

3. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor)

Then you just have to analyze the log file activity.txt for any unexpected program and/or website.