Gerhard Potgieter

Have you ever tried waching a video on YouTube and gotten the message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”?

If you are a South African and using Telkom then your answer probably is yes.

The problem arrise from transparent proxies SAIX pushes all traffic through. This results in your connection to the site having a different IP each time, and then this can be seen as a hacking attempt of some sort.

Some forums out there operate on the same principal, say you are logged in and your IP changes you are then automatically logged out.

Good news is there is a work arround. You can use a fixed proxy, that will result in you having the same IP address each time you load a page.

To make use of this simply edit your browser proxy setting and add cache.saix.net:8080 as the server and port.

Now you should be able to browse sites uninterupted.

I’m an active MyBroadband member and a few times have seen a thread called “I am the Thread Killer” in the off-topic section, what drew my attention everytime was the size of the thread.

I hardly ever post in the thread but just now I had a look inside and again the post count got my attention and I started wondering what the largest thread is in the world. Im sure “I am the Thread Killer” could surely be there with the top of them, if not the number one thread.

I did some research on google and couldn’t realy find any other thread that mached “I am the Thread Killer“. Currently it consists of 165 702 replies, 11047 pages, and a enourmous 2 881 061 views to date. The thread was started on 10-03-2005 so it quite old, yet still it is a very active thread.

A while back I read the the owner of MyBroadband wanted to close down the thread cause it seriously cripled the server where the site is hosted but the formnites didn’t like the idea very much, so they upgraded the server quite a bit.

Firefox 3 got released today. And with the release is an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. So if you are a Firefox fanboy, help contribute to the world record by downloading Firefox 3 here.

South Africans have until 17:00 hours today to complete their downloads for it to count toward the world record.

The Firefox community is always up to some cool original way to declare their passion for Firefox. This time it’s not exception, and what better way to do it than to set a Guinness World record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

So if you are a Firefox fanatic all you have to do to help contribute to this world record is to download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day sometime in June. In the meantime you can check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. Mozilla will then let you know when Firefox 3 gets out the door, kicking of the 24 hour attempt.

If you would like to help assist in the run up to Download Day, you can do the following

• Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
• Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and Mozilla will provide the party favors.
• Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.

So all you Firefox fanatics out there, lets help contribute toward this world record. If you would like to put a badge on your website or blog, you can get badges here.

With the increased popularity of wireless technology today more and more homes and businesses are starting to use this technology.

What most of these users don’t know is that if you don’t secure your wireless network anybody within range of the network can gain access to it if you don’t have security measures in place.

A while back Telkom started giving away free wireless ADSL routers to all new self install users signing up. This move contributed to a even larger percentage of unsecured wireless networks out there, and these networks are unsecured without the users even knowing it.

If you are into wifi like I am, every now and then you would do a scan just to see how many networks is in your area. With these scans almost every time I picked up at least 2 unsecured wireless home networks. Just to mention I can then easily connect to these networks and then use the ADSL, some cases I could even log in to the wireless router with the default username and password. In a country like South Africa where bandwidth is so expensive there are allot of people out there that exploit these unsecured wireless networks and use up all the bandwidth there is, leaving the owner flabbergasted to hear from his ISP that he used up all his bandwidth.

So I thought it would be a good thing just to list a few things you can do to ensure that your wireless network is protected from unauthorized use.

1. First thing you do when you receive your wireless router is to always change the default username and/or password.
2. Enable some form of security, like WEP, WPA, WPA2, or MAC authentication. This will ask new users to the network for a passkey to be able to connect to the network, or the user’s mac must be enabled on the router.
3. Use static IP addressing rather than a DHCP server. This will make it harder for an intruder to guess your IP range and Gateway IP for internet use.
4. If you are a large business running advanced wireless network use RADIUS to authenticate your users.
5. And last if you can check your router logs as often as possible to see attempts of unauthorized access.

If your are still not sure how to secure your network feel free to leave comments and I’ll try and direct you into the right direction to help you secure your wireless network.

Remember a wireless network is never safe from unauthorized access but you can always make it harder for a person to be able to access it. Always remember a form of security is better than none at all.

The guys at Adecco sent me the link to their brand new blogspot. Its a blog containing all the available positions they have aswell as what the specifications is to apply for it.

They are also in the process of setting up a blog for Employers where you as a job seeker can post your qualifications and experience and then employers can visit this blog and seek out future employees.

Nice job Adecco for making job positions more freely available to the IT job seeker. The blog displaying all the current jobs available can be found here, and the blog where you can advertise your expertise and experience can be found here. All you have to do to feature on the employers blog is to send your CV requesting to post it on the blog to Hennie Swart at Hennie.Swart@Adecco.co.za, and a short description on your skills will be placed but with no name.

Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 here.

I installed it and did not have any problem to date, so if you are a Firefox junkie like I am or even a plugin developer I would suggest you install this RC and start testing or making sure your plugins is compatible with Firefox 3 before the final release.

Nadeo recently launched TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF), the successor of their previous free racing game TrackMania Nations (TMN).

Being part of CTWUG we have a few avid gamers on the network and one of the games we played allot was TrackMania Nations (TMN). So with the new TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF) I thought I would give it a go and set up a server, and as with every game on the network users prefer a stats page aswell. So after searching high and low on the web I couldn’t find a stats solutions for TMNF that produced stats based on real time results, the closest I got was TMOS - TrackMania Offline Server, so the obvious thing to do was write my own solution.

Running a dedicated TMNF server required ASECO, Automatic Server Control, to generate statistics in realtime to a online database or local database. It took me about 2 days of programming to get a stable running bug free site. I called it AsecoStats cause it is based on the Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF.

The index page displays live server stats like how many players are currently online, current track, list all player names and best times that are currently online aswell as the Author records aswell as the best time for the track.

The Players page displays all the current players that ever played on the server aswell as their total wins and total time played on the server.

When you click on the player name you will be transfered to a page detailing all the tracks the player has ever raced aswell as their best time for each track and poll position

On the Tracks page is a list of all the challenges (tracks) ever played on the server with their author, best time and what player achieved this time.

When you click on the track name you will be transfered to a page that details all the players that ever played that track aswell as their poll position and their time.

This is all I did for now as this is the first beta version (v. 0.9b), and what the users wanted to see for now. The pages is written in php and utilizes Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF’s mysql database. I haven’t decided on a license for it yet but if interest is big enough I will possibly release this under GNU.

For the next release I’m looking into a point system so users can get a overall server position and not just per track. Please leave your comments as to what you guys think of this and any suggestions is also welcome.

South African telecoms is really starting to take off. Yesterday I wrote about OpenWeb’s VPN ADSL that offered you 30gb international traffic for and odd R700 and something.

Today I found another ISP thats more suited to the needs of the lower end user. SAOL a subsidiary ISP of Cybersmart now offers users a bundled line and high cap account.

The package includes 15GB of unshaped data, a 384K ADSL line, a static IP, aswell as router rental all for only R499. After you reached your cap data is charged at R59 per GB which is still cheap.

Rumour also has it that Cybersmart will soon be offering a solution called Nightrider where only 1/5th of you data usage count toward your cap during 1am and 7am. So if you use 15 gigabytes during the month during these times, only 3 gigabytes will count towards your cap.

Things are really starting to take shape in the South African telecoms space, looks like this could be the work of Neotel selling SAT3 bandwidth to the ISP’s. I would just like to see the big ISP’s like WebAfrica and IS start offering similar products.

OpenWeb recently launched a 30 GB VPN ADSL service.

The service is a 30GB - 512k VPN ADSL account selling for R749 which equates to R24.97 per GB.

The service works through a 30GB local account, included in the price, connected to the OpenWeb VPN server.

This new revolutionary product allows you 100% unshaped bandwidth, P2P and torrent downloads, and pretty much anything you can think of on the net, running over OpenWeb’s fibre Based network for the best latencies!

OpenWeb gets my vote for this one, a great idea in providing South Africans with cheap bandwidth. This is no doubt a step in the right direction to provide South Africans with low cost high cap bandwidth. Great work OpenWeb, now the others must just start to follow.