Archive for November, 2007
Team Tech-FAQ is proud to announce a new tool for your crypto toolbox: GnuPG Shell.
GnuPG Shell
GnuPG Shell is a cross-platform graphical frontend for GNU Privacy Guard.
GnuPG Shell can be used to encrypt, decrypt, and sign files, to verify signatures and to manage private and public keys.
In addition to source code, we provide pre-built installation packages for Debian Linux, RedHat Linux, and Microsoft Windows.
GnuPG Shell is built using:
- Python- An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language.
- wxWidgets - A cross-platform GUI and tools library for GTK, MS Windows, and MacOS.
- Code::Blocks - A cross-platform IDE built around wxWidgets, designed to be extensible and configurable.
GnuPG Shell should make it a shell of a lot easier to keep your data secure. 
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 | Posted in Internet | No Comments »
I just approved a bunch of new proxy sites. We now have over thirteen hundred working proxies in our proxy list.
The definition of what is a “working proxy” is one that comes up frequently. A person may try twenty proxies — and discover that none of them work for him. Are those proxies then not “working proxies”?
Not exactly. Those proxies still work fine - they have just been blocked by the content filter (such as WebSense) at their location.
Sometimes one of these users will say “Why don’t you delete this proxy from the list, because it is now blocked?” It’s not that simple, for two reasons:
- There are dozens of content filtering software packages, each with its own databases
- Each organization can define their own filter rule sets and individual site filters
The proxy might be blocked by SmartFilter, but allowed by WebSense. Or, it might be blocked only by one particular school.
There is simply no way for us to tell what proxies are blocked from what networks.
The best strategy for proxy users to follow is to use new proxies, as they are less likely to be blocked by content filters.
Alexa shows that, after the United States, Brazil is the second largest concentration of Tech-FAQ readers.
The top five countries for Tech-FAQ readers are:
We welcome our visitors from these countries, and from all of the nations of the earth!
Monday, November 12th, 2007 | Posted in VoIP News | 1 Comment »
Organizations look to unified communications for efficiency and emergency preparedness:
"It’s just another way of trying to get a message out to students. When something bad happens like the Virginia Tech [shooting], you have to try to get to students any way you can," said Steve Stempien, director of information services at Adrian College.
The technology also has more prosaic, albeit important, uses. Admissions counselors at the college intend to use the new Mobile Call Manager as a way to "stay in communication with prospective students," said Stempien.
This and other functionalities are part of a package that ShoreTel is introducing Nov. 12 as it tries to jump on the unified communications bandwagon.
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files on the Internet. The goal of Librivox is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.
The free audio books are available in MP3 and Ogg formats.
LibriVox has over 1,000 free audio books in the catalog. Download one for your iPod today.
Sunday, November 4th, 2007 | Posted in Skype | No Comments »
Careful using the firewall in Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard), or you might miss some calls:
"This firewall is a mess," Rich Mogull, a security consultant and former Gartner analyst, said after spending two days digging into the new firewall’s capabilities. "It’s a step back from Tiger’s firewall. I was originally pretty bullish on Leopard’s security, and I still am on the concepts, but the implementation makes most of its advances ineffective or unusable."
The firewall in Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a Leopard uses a bare-bones interface — earlier this week, Mogull called it "so simple as to be nearly useless"
Good news for videoconferencers who hate the jumpy, jerky nature of so many video over IP calls:
Skype 
has announced enhancements to the quality of its video calls, but only for users of certain new webcams from Logitech.
Using the moniker "High Quality" (HQ), the enhanced video runs at a frame rate of 30fps rather than Skype’s usual 15fps, and at VGA resolution (640×480 pixels) rather than QVGA (320×240 pixels).
The boost comes as the result of collaboration between the engineering teams of Skype and the peripherals manufacturer Logitech. As a result, it will only work on an upcoming version of Skype — 3.6 — and through the use of Logitech’s QuickCam Pro 9000, QuickCam Pro for Notebooks or QuickCam Orbit AF cameras, all of which sport Carl Zeiss optics and high-speed autofocus capabilities.
From the Guardian:
In what looks like a highly developed piece of irony, hackers have proven that Voice over internet Telephony (VoIP) accounts are prone to the nuisance of voice spam - by attacking the university where the co-author of the protocol that VoIP runs on is professor of computer science.
Henning Schulzrinne, co-author of the session initiation protocol (SIP) that is used by all the major VoIP services except Skype, believes the attack (which left unsolicited marketing messages on multiple phone extensions at Columbia University) might have been targeted at him, but could also have been a result of the institution not having a stringent firewall policy in place. Either way, he - like many in the computer and internet security industries - now believes VoIP is the next big target for spammers.
