Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Today marked the death of two great startups: AllPeers and Ezmo. AllPeers is the Firefox extension that originally emerged as a way to share files between your friends and family, and later on they started to support BitTorrent transfers. Having this integrated into your browser is pretty convenient, but it didn’t take off quite like they hoped that it would. They didn’t get the user growth that they were shooting for, and that’s understandable. The extension didn’t last long on my system because it was difficult to find other people willing to install it, which is required if you want to share files with them.

Here’s a snippet from what the AllPeers blog had to say about shutting down the service:

It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

Ezmo actually sounds like a pretty nifty music sharing service, but I hadn’t heard about it until today. They would let you upload your music to their servers so that you could listen to it no matter where you were at. The software worked with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player for uploading your tunes, which you could then share with your friends.

They ran into problems when trying to work with the music labels who weren’t very cooperative:

It has always been clear to us that Ezmo had to be a free service for all users. Our revenue model is based on music sales (and promotion), for which one needs at least some sort of cooperation with music labels. We have had repeated meetings and contact with the major labels, but their willingness to cooperate in finding innovative solutions for music sales seems non-existent. Their terms were not compatible with the conditions a small start-up operates under. We still feel absolutely confident that services like Ezmo will have a major significance in the future, but the lack of cooperation and even threats of lawsuits from the labels and their organisations has made intermediate financing paramount in order to secure a necessary time horizon for the company. Without that financing in place, Ezmo has no alternative but to shut the service down and close the company.

So here we are burying two great startups today. The AllPeers site has already been taken down, but the extension is still available on the Firefox add-ons site. Ezmo will continue running until March 14th.

Thanks to Emil for the tip on Ezmo!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

In the last week we’ve seen two major browsers, Firefox (review) and Opera, release huge milestones for their desktop software. Just five days after the release of Opera 9.5 they are reporting that there have been an astounding 4.7 million downloads of the browser, thereby averaging almost a million downloads per day. That’s pretty good considering they have 20 million users, which means about a quarter of them have already made the upgrade.

Mozilla, who was going after a Guinness World Record, came barreling through with everything they had. Early in the morning they were having troubles keeping up with the greedy geeks like yourself that just had to be the “first” to get their hands on the browser. Mozilla’s pipes were definitely clogged as they were trying to serve up 2 Gigabits of HTTP traffic per second, plus another 13 Gigabits of downloads per second. While they could have been a little better prepared, that’s like trying to fit a bus through a tunnel the size of a straw. As things began leveling out they were able to get the traffic under control, and averaged 150 downloads per second (9,000 per minute). Not too shabby.

In the end those 9,000 downloads every minute worked out to a total of 8,271,687 downloads of Firefox 3.0 in the first day. That’s over 3 million more downloads than Mozilla was hoping to get! Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 countries according to Spread Firefox:

Note: The download counter still seems to be increasing despite the Firefox Download Day being over. These stats are taken as of June 18th at 1:19PM CST (3 minutes after Download Day officially finished).

1. United States: 2,582,070 Downloads
2. Germany: 666,627 Downloads
3. Japan: 403,417 Downloads
4. Spain: 298,204 Downloads
5. United Kingdom: 295,557 Downloads
6. France: 290,692 Downloads
7. Iran: 258,774 Downloads
8. Italy: 244,319 Downloads
9. Canada: 223,618 Downloads
10. Lithuania: 213,871 Downloads

Net Applications has also reported on the market share usage of Firefox 3 over the last 24-hours, and it looks as though a good portion of Firefox users are adopting the new browser. Here’s a chart of the market share starting on June 17th at 10AM (EDT), and ending on June 18th at 11AM (EDT):

Market Share for Firefox 3 in the First Day

In May 2008 Firefox had an 18.41% market share overall, and according to the hourly reports Firefox 3.0 alone peaked at 4.56% of the total market share. If those stats are anything to go by about 25% of Firefox users are already running the latest version of the browser.

Congrats to both Mozilla and Opera on successfully distributing their browsers to millions and millions of users! If you participated in the Firefox Download Day be sure to grab your commemorative form.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

All over the Internet you see things that say MD5, SHA-1, or even CRC. All of that jibber-jabber is in reference to hash values which verify the integrity of a download. Basically, if I wanted to send you a file I would calculate one of those values, send you the file, and then you would calculate the value for the same type of hash that I used. If it matches the value that I calculated then the odds are pretty good that there wasn’t a problem with the file transfer.

How do you go about calculating these values? I have no idea why Windows doesn’t have some sort of right-click menu to do this because they could just hide it like they do with the “Command Prompt Here” for Vista. Luckily there is plenty of software that will do the grunt work for us and the few that I tested even work in Vista (despite them being several years old). Here is a rundown of the solutions I found:

digestIT (Freeware Download)

This is my favorite program for calculating and comparing hash values. It works with MD5 and SHA-1 hashes by providing a simple-to-use right-click menu for any file(s) in Windows. The reason this is my favorite is because it will not only calculate the value but you can also input a hash value and see if it matches the file’s value. That way you don’t have to sit there comparing two long strings of letters and numbers. Here is a screenshot of what digestIT looks like for the whole comparison process:

The verification feature is pretty important to me because that is primarily what I need to do. This just makes the whole process a little easier and means I have to think less…which is always a good thing.

HashOnClick (Freeware Download)

This one is pretty similar to the one above except that it doesn’t have the verification option. It will only generate the hash value for you and then you’ll have to manually compare it. HashOnClick works with MD5 and SHA-1 but also does CRC hash values. Here is a screenshot of the program being used:

MD5 Column Display (Freeware Download)

This one only does MD5 hash calculations but it is unique in the way it presents itself. You don’t ever have to make an extra click to see that MD5 value because you can set it up to display a column in Windows Explorer for it. Here is what it looks like:

MD5Sum Utility (Online Calculator)

That is a site that can calculate nearly all of the different has values: haval, MD2, MD4, MD5, ripemd128, ripemd160, SHA, SHA-160, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, tiger, and whirlpool. So why wouldn’t you use this? The first reason is that you have to upload the file to their site in order for it to calculate the hash value. It is required (for logical reasons) that the PC doing the calculation has the file on the computer…which brings up another point. If you are having to upload the file to them there is no guarantee that there wasn’t an error in that process. Therefore the file that you have on your PC might be completely intact but when you upload it there is an error which results in a miscalculated hash value. Online hash generators are convenient but not something you should completely trust.

Overview

There are all kinds of ways to calculate the hash values but hopefully you’ll find one of those alternatives to work well. There is also a Firefox extension, called MDHashTool, that hasn’t been updated in years that can do the verification of the hash values all from within the browser…but you won’t be able to install the extension in a version of Firefox greater than 1.0.6 without overriding the extension compatibility check. For some reason I thought that Opera had this feature built-into their transfer manager but I looked all over and couldn’t find it. If you have a better/easier alternative for doing this please let me know!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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OS X Lion is coming to the Mac App Store, ushering in a new era of digital distribution for their desktop operating system. And rumors are flying that iOS devices will soon receive over-the-air updates. If we had to smash these two pieces of information together and speculate about the future a little bit, we’d say Apple is heading down a path to automatic background updates for all of their operating systems. Hardcore nerds would hate this to be sure, but for the average user, it’s a good thing. More »

This article was written on February 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Last week, Newsweek sat down to interview Bill Gates for the launch of Vista.  He was asked about all of the typical questions regarding Vista like security, upgrading, and whether or not he was satisfied with the outcome of Vista. The one part that caught my eye was when he was asked how he felt about the infamous “Get a Mac” campaign that Apple has started with the most recent commercial showing the PC going in for surgery. This of course is in regards to upgrading to Vista.

Everybody takes the commercials differently. Some look at them and can’t help but laugh, others get infuriated over the serious jabs and sometimes untruthful lies that fill the commercial. One of the first things you’ll notice in any of the commercials is that the Apple is portrayed as a “cool stud” and the PC is portrayed as a “geeky dud.” This is the first thing Bill addresses. He was asked by Newsweek:

Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?

Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And finally, the last and probably the most interesting question addressed some of the features in Vista which are very similar to those in the Mac.

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

Now, perhaps I’m just under-educated with the Mac, but I haven’t heard about that many exploits. Every single day? Clearly hackers/attackers go after vulnerabilities in PCs because that’s where the market share is, but every single day a total exploit is found for a Mac? I’ve always heard people say that you’d never need an Anti-virus for Linux, simply because the general population is not using it, therefore creating viruses would be a waste of time. It’s a similar situation for Apple as well (although they definitely have more of the market share than Linux), but obviously, if what Bill Gates said is true, perhaps Apple needs to take a good look at their security.

There’s been quite the collection of these “Get a Mac” ads.  You can find clips of all of them here. And, if you’re interested in reading the entire interview with Bill Gates, you can find that here.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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