What about listening to Pandora or other USA IP-based online music services if you are not into the USA? There are many add-on for Firefox which can help you to use the right proxy for appearing in different places in the world but, in my experience, you can have some difficulties when you try to use them.
In fact the IPs of free proxies change frequently and sometimes you are obliged to spend a lot of time searching for the right IP of free proxies. Other times the free proxy addresses are so overcrowded that you have to wait many seconds before you can visualize webpages.
One exception is anonymoX, a simple add-on for Firefox which always works properly and assure a good connection speed. AnonymoX has two different service levels, the free basic service has fewer features but it really works properly and it’s fast.
W
ith the free level you can choose your favourite IP exit country between USA, UK and NL. You can also decide if you prefer to stealth your web surfing using anonymoX features or the classic TOR servers. Moreover, you can change your fictional ID every times you want also while you are surfing the web.
During all our tests anonymoX was able to assure us a good surfing privacy, in particular we successfully tried to change browser id and we really appreciated the possibility of visiting .onion websites through the Tor option. Recommended!!!
In our last post we examined the possibility to recover deleted data from USB keys and disks. Today we want to focus your attention on the proper way to destroy sensitive data from your disks.
On Ubuntu you have the possibility to move any file to the Trash but, as we demonstrate in our last post, anyone has the possibility to recover them using a simple, basic GUI, program called PhotoRec.
If you want to be reasonably sure that none will be able to recover a file you decided to permanently delete you have to use the Shred command. Shred is native in Ubuntu Kernel and literally delete your files overwriting them repeatedly with arbitrary data. After you delete a file with Shred you can be sufficiently sure that recovering procedures will not succeed.
As usual we must warn you that technology is rapidly evolving and what could be considered sure today, tomorrow will be out of date! So, if you think you need to preserve your privacy in the best way, don’t forget to change the hard disks regularly and mechanically destroy your old ones. Sincerely we hope our readers haven’t this kind of need.
To start using Shred on Ubuntu you have to open a Terminal and type:
sudo shred –help
In this way you will visualize the grammar and all the possible options offered by this program.
The correct grammar to use Shred is:
shred [OPTIONS] FILE
or, if you want to shred a entire partition:
shred [OPTIONS] /dev/[HDA9]
The possible options are:
-f, –force change permissions to allow writing if necessary
-n, –iterations=N overwrite N times instead of the default (3)
–random-source=FILE get random bytes from FILE
-s, –size=N shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)
-u, –remove truncate and remove file after overwriting
-v, –verbose show progress
-x, –exact do not round file sizes up to the next full block;
this is the default for non-regular files
-z, –zero add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
–help display this help and exit
–version output version information and exit
In our experience, to operate in the fastest way, we decided to add Shred on the Nautilus Menu and have the command ready with a simple right click on the mouse.
For this reason you have to open a Terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions
Then you launch the program following this path: System->Preference->Nautilus Actions Configuration.
Last, you have to configure Shred filling e.g. the following parameters:
Label: Shred
Tooltip: Shred utility to securely erase files
Icon: gtk-dialog-warning
Path: shred
Parameters: -f -u -v -z %M
Filenames: *
Mimetypes: */*
Appears if selection contains: Both
Be sure to check the box “Appears if selection has multiple files or folders“
To finish your configuration, do not forget to open again a Terminal and type:
nautilus -q
nautilus
Everyday we use USB keys to transfer data without transmitting them through the t. The USB keys and portable disks are small, light and their data capacity allow us to move in privacy huge files. This idyll sometimes is broken by a fatal mistake: we unintentionally delete an important file. Normally, if we are smart we recover the erased file in the Trash but in other situations when we realize the mistake we had made is too late.
In this circumstances is very import to stop to use our USB key or portable disk till we are able to use a good software for data recovering. On Ubuntu you have a wise number of dedicated software that can do this job for you, the most powerful run on Terminal as testdisk, foremost, and scalpel but you can also use a “minimal GUI” software as PhotoRec.
PhotoRec is very intuitive to use and it is able to recover many data formats from jpeg to db. After you install it using Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Center you can launch it in Terminal with:
sudo photorec
Immediately a GUI Terminal interface appears and you have just to follow the instruct ions you visualize on your monitor.
Using the arrows and the Enter keys you have to:
1 – Choose the USB device from where you want to recover the data
2 – Select the partition table (usually Intel)
3 – Specify the partition table
4 – Select the right filesystem where the data were stored
5 – Decide if you want to try the data recovering from all the free space
6 – select the directory where you want to store the recovered data. IMPORTANT: do not store the recovered data on the same USB key you are scanning for recovering
7 – Wait till PhotoRec finishes the recover operations.
PhotoRec is fast and, during our tests, we were able to recover almost the 100% of data. Not bad!!!
This is the situation: you have a IOMEGA Screenplay Pro and while you where trying to find a better output resolution for your monitor you accidentally (or not) selected the HD option and now you are not able to visualize anything.
In few words this is the easiest problem you can afford but also one of the worst because you are not able to visualize the menu and so you cannot revert the right monitor resolution.
I visited many websites but unfortunately I didn’t find any forum or post about this topic. In any case I like to focus your attention on this ScreenPlay Pro HD wiki which is a real mine of information and tips about this specific hardware.
So I tried to “play” with the Screen Play Pro HD remote but I was not able to find a solution without visualizing anything on the monitor.
At the end, when I was thinking to reset the Screenplay and loosing all the data contained, I tried to use an old solution I used different times with other stuff: I pressed the power button for more than 10 seconds while I was switching on the device.
Something happened because the monitor showed me the Screenplay boot up window for a couple of seconds. At this point I pressed the NTSC/PAL button and the Screenplay Pro HD menu was visualized on my monitor again.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 150,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.
If you use Ubuntu 10.04 or any other Linux distribution which doesn’t automatically upgrade your Firefox to the latest version you can force it.
First of all you have to launch Terminal and add the right PPA to the repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa
Then you need to update and upgrade the OS using:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
If you are installing Firefox for the first time the right commands are:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install firefox firefox-gnome-support firefox-locale-en
As usual on Linux, it is not necessary to reboot the computer and you can start immediately to use your updated Firefox.
After I installed some new software I wasn’t able to update Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Update Manager was not able to check for updates and when I tried to use the Synaptic Package Manager I hadn’t better results. A reboot was not the right solution and I tested different ways to solve my problem saving the Ubuntu installation in my computer.
Searching on internet I discovered that there are few possible solution to avoid this problem and, in case you have the same bug on your computer, I decided to sum-up the most powerful after I successfully tried them.
First of all you can try to force the update process through the Terminal typing:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
If this doesn’t work you will try with this next step:
sudo rm var/lib/dpkg/lock sudo dpkg --configure -a
Then launch again the Update Manager to verify if you succeed and if nothing happened solve the matter typing:
sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf sudo apt-get update
and try again to launch the Update Manager.
In my case this was enough to restore all the Update Manager features and solve the problem. If you have extra problems about this bug or if you want to suggest alternative solutions, please, don’t hesitate to comment this post.
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