Chucks Blog

I recently had to play with LogMeIn.com’s services for a class, and began thinking about the service’s security. Yes, they state they use encryption. Yes, they provide the ability to use one time passwords. But are they really secure? I guess I am reluctant to trust third parties with access to my computers, but hey, [...]

Alright, I’ll confess. I do have a Facebook account, even though I am a bit of a privacy nut. However, unlike most users I have employed the privacy settings to protect me from the average data mining theif.
Although it looks like it’s about to get a bit harder for these folks to get the data [...]

ab (apache bench) is a command line program that comes with apache by default in most distributions. It allows one to run a quick and efficient test of how a server can handle a heavy load of clients.
To use it simply run (as root)
ab -n number_of_requests_to_try http://www.websiteyouwanttobenchmark.com/
Note that the trailing / is necessary for ab [...]

Us bloggers pretty much have it made. We write our opinion about something and don’t really have to worry about the cost of the medium used to distribute it. Sure, 30$ USD per month is still a little bit of a bill for hosting services, but most bloggers have a solution to this: Advertising.
Back in [...]

According to this analysis, Bing users are 50% more likely to click on advertisements. That’s cool and all, but how significant are these numbers?
Currently my search engine traffic is split as follows this month (note: numbers are rounded to the nearest multiple of five)

Google – 80%
Yahoo – 5%
Bing – 5%
AOL <5%
Ask Jeeves <5%
All others use [...]

After just posting about a command line solution to using Tor I thought it’d be a good idea to quickly mention a few security concerns about the network.
Tor is designed to make your traffic somewhat anonymous, and does not make you more secure by using it. If you use tor with encrypted protocols and avoid [...]

Hmm. This doesn’t look good. According to this cnet news posting, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products in return for freebies or payments. This would basically put bloggers who do not provide full 100% idiot-proof discloser in hot water.
“But some bloggers, the AP article [...]

Mobile Broadband allows us to connect to the Internet anywhere we have cellular phone access, like at the nearest park or even on that long drive to the next state. But unfortunately most of us are unable to afford it due to its high price tag and low traffic caps.
The cost is static across the [...]