On March 10th, 2008, I’ve posted a trick on how to get 1 year a-squared Anti-Malware genuine license for free. As usual, a week later after posting this tip on this blog site, the coupon code is no longer valid to convert it to real legitimate license. If you don’t know what a-squared Anti-Malware is, it protects your system from Trojans, Worms, Keyloggers, Dialers, Rootkits and Spyware.

The latest version of a-squared Anti-Malware is v3.5 and it now relies on the intelligence of the a-squared community to reduce false alarms. Other new features are better self-protection, recognition of mouse and keyboard simulators, and an extended Paranoid Mode. The latest version 3.5 can also now be started from a USB stick (portable).

Good news is the offer for 1 year free a-squared Anti-Malware 3.5 license is back! It seems that this offer expires on July 31, 2008 OR when license limit has been met. If you’ve missed your chance to get the free a-squared Anti-Malware license back in March, get it quick before it expires again! Just follow the few simple steps to get a full version security software that cost $39.95 for free.


Every computer that has contact with the Internet is in constant danger of being infected with malignant Malware. There are many different types of damaging software. Trojans, Worms, Keyloggers, Dialers, Rootkits and Spyware programs often pretend to be harmless programs. In reality, they spy on your system and open the door for hackers to access your computer.

a-squared Anti-Malware 3.5 establishes efficient protection against all these damaging programs and now provides extra security for the PCs of over four million users. Daily updates via the Internet ensure that even very new damaging code can be recognized and eliminated via a signature comparison. This is important because hundreds of new Malware variants create danger in the workplace every day. Backdoors, Bots and Tracking Cookies are also recognized with this method. However, a-squared Anti-Malware does not just rely on Signatures. The unique Malware-Intrusion Detection System (Malware-IDS) goes one step further by using behavioral analysis to identify and block potentially dangerous programs before they can do any damage.

Here are the steps on how to get free a-squared Anti-Malware license to protect you from malwares for 365 days.

1. Create a new user account. You need to enter a name, e-mail address and click “Create User Account” button. Make sure you use a real email address because a random generated password will be sent there.

2. Now check the email address that you’ve entered earlier. You should get an email from a-squared Control Center (donotreply@www.emsisoft.com) with the subject “Your user account information‏”. If you didn’t get it, check your spam/junk folder. The password is in the email.

3. Type in your username and password (shown on the email) to login to the Customer Center.

4. After you’ve successfully logged in, click on Manage Licenses at the left side of the page. Then click the “Get license by coupon code” link.

5. Enter rac-wav-nak-737 as coupon code and hit Convert button. You should then see that it has added a-squared Anti-Malware to the list.

6. Download latest a-squared Anti-Malware v3.5 and install.

7. After installation completed, run a-squared Anti-Malware. You’ll be prompted to enter an account to login. Enter the same email address and password that you entered in Customer Center on the program and click Log in.

8. It will show that you have a “full version license” installed.

Please take note that a-squared Anti-Malware is NOT an antivirus program, but a powerful antimalware security software that can protect and detect a huge list of malwares (1,442,285). It belongs to the same category as SpyBot, Ad-Aware, SpySweeper, SUPER Antispyware and Spyware Doctor. After enabling Background Guard (OnExecution Scan, Malware-IDS, Cookie monitoring), a-squared Anti-Malware takes up about 60MB memory. Enjoy and be protected from trojans!

From the month of February up till now, I’ve shared with all of you on how to obtain free genuine license for Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Norton AntiBot, a-squared Anti-Malware and McAfee VirusScan Plus. I believe thousands of people has benefited from these commercial security software for free. However, I still get a lot of emails telling me that they’ve missed all those promotions and their computer is not running any security software at all or it has expired.

Unfortunately, these promotions don’t come very often. So I usually suggest them to an article which I written last year about a comprehensive list of free antivirus available to download and use. Some of them replied to me saying that they prefer commercial products because it is surely better than free, otherwise the company won’t be charging money for it. Well, that’s quite true…

Today I discovered a way to get a 1 year iolo AntiVirus genuine license key for free. iolo AntiVirus normally cost $39.95 for one year subscription but will be FREE if you follow the instructions. For those who missed all those previous promotions, be quick and don’t miss this one!


iolo AntiVirus keeps you safe by using advanced real-time technology that provides continuous maximum protection and automatically repels viruses before they can enter your computer.

Its fully integrated email protection works transparently in the background automatically scanning and disinfecting messages as they are transmitted, and an intuitive interface makes it easy to activate scheduled system inspections for a permanently virus-free PC.

Features of iolo AntiVirus

West Coast Labs Checkmark-Certified virus protection.

Always-on protection runs transparently in the background

Hassle-free setup protects your PC from the moment of installation

Integrated email protection scans messages as they are transmitted

Intuitive interface makes protecting your PC easy

Extremely efficient technology does not slow your system down

Includes one year antivirus service subscription

Hourly virus updates always ensures the latest protection

Unlimited email, phone, and web support

Here are the steps on how to get free iolo AntiVirus genuine license to protect your computer from virus, worms, trojans and other threats for 365 days.

1. Visit this page and click Continue button. You should see a page with the Item Code AV1FPRM, Description iolo Antivirus Free Promotion, 3 PC, One Year with the order total showing $0.00. Click Secure Checkout button.

2. Enter your first name, last name, address 1, city, postal code, country phone number and email address. You can actually enter fake or bogus information but make sure the email address is a real one. Click Continue button.

3. Make sure Email Delivery is selected and click Continue button.

4. Review Order page will load and click Place Order button.

5. Once you see a page that says “Thank you! Your order #XXXXXXXXXXXXXX is complete.”, check the email address that you’ve entered at step 2. Open the email from iolo technologies, LLC (orders@iolo.com) with the subject “Thank you for ordering from iolo technologies, #XXXXXXXXXXXXXX“‏. Note down the User ID and Serial Number.

6. Download iolo AntiVirus and install.

7. Select “I own iolo AntiVirus and can enter my serial number later” and click Next.

8. Enter the User ID and Serial # that you noted down earlier. Click OK and continue with the installation.

Voila! You now have a genuinely registered iolo AntiVirus to protect your computer from virus, worms, trojans and other threats for 365 days.

iolo AntiVirus works on PC running Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista with 256 MB of RAM. At least 30 MB of hard disk space is required for installation. Internet connection is also required for virus definition and program updates. If you have not heard of iolo before, they have a very popular PC tuning product called System Mechanic which has been around for many many years. iolo has been around for as long as 10 years! You can definitely trust the quality of their software.

After Team Paradox has figured out with the idea of using OEM BIOS Emulation to crack Windows Vista, a lot of people has made an effort to improve and simplify the cracking process. CLoNY did an excellent job in making the whole cracking process a “setup”. Just install and it will automatically crack for you. However, it did not give you any selection or choices during the cracking process.

STRO has created a Microsoft Windows Vista Activator 2.1.0.2 via emulation of BIOS vendor. It is a graphical user interface activator optimized for Windows Vista through BIOS emulation from leading manufacturers.



After 2 days, STRO has created a newer Vista Activator version 2.1.2.0.6 BETA. It has much more functions compared to 2.1.0.2.

Version 2.1.2.0.5 added NEC and SONY BIOS manufacturer. It also has a built-in external Product ID Checker.

I installed Windows Vista without entering a product key during installation. Used the cracked and it turned my Windows Vista into a licensed Windows Vista Ultimate! I wonder how is Microsoft going to fight back on this cracking method? Maybe they’ll release a KB929391 update on Windows Update? I really don’t encourage the use of Windows Vista cracks because one day Microsoft will find a way to make this crack unusable and your system might be unbootable. It’ll be a lot more trouble to make your computer bootable again…

I found a video demo from Hacking Defined showing how you can crack wireless WEP in 10 minutes.

This is an interesting technique, where packets are injected to the access point, making it release weak IVs. You’ll think twice about WEP after this! Always use WPA if possible. Stealing your internet bandwidth is already bad and even worse that a person gaining access to your network!

[ Download Cracking WEP in 10 Minutes Video ]

So I’ve been looking around the internet for different things recently, using StumbleUpon, which if you haven’t used before, I have to say, is a great waste of time. But one of the things I’ve been noticing is when it comes to security, and especially passwords, is that it’s not as good as people think it might be. For example: I came across an article that claimed that researchers have cracked 768-RSA signed and encrypted datastreams, which if you don’t want to read the article, was expected to last upwards of 1,500 years. Stuff like this kinda shakes my believe in using encryption due to the fact that I remember hearing last year WPA-Personal and WPA-Enterprise, version 1, was cracked in under a minute. Now what I’m doing by letting you all know this, is not trying to scare you, but trying to inform you of what is going on in the security world. And while I could post on the factions, I’ll leave that up to a forum post, seeing as it’s not important. However, I have also found recently some interesting ideas for generating passwords: a tool that’s called Password Cards… and it’s just a printer away from you.

Basically, a password card is what it sounds like, and that would be every Security Tech’s nightmare: a piece of paper with passwords on it. But before you shoot me down in flight, I suggest you look below and try to figure out what they are if I handed you one off the street.

I don’t think you’d be expecting them to be my passwords.

I know this idea seems contrary to the popular belief of providing a strong password and keeping it in your head, but think about it: how many people do you know of that have only one account to log into? I’ve got my Linux partition on my laptop along with the Windows one, Raymond.cc’s forum as well as the blog, my hotmail account, my GMX account, my banking site… right there, with one strong password apiece, I’m looking at seven different passwords to keep straight in my mind. And as much as people you can have a good memory for this kind of stuff, I unfortunately, do not. I’ll give you an example of how bad it is: up until last year, you could get into any of my accounts by using the password ‘adobe1234‘. Since this is no longer the case, you can’t get into my accounts… but that proves the needs for these password cards: to help people use stronger passwords that are harder to break into, thus preventing weak passwords from being used. From there, we can all deal with the social engineering though better training. With these password cards, we can choose a letter and a number, or in the case of Your PasswordCard, a colour, a number, and a character… but it’s much easier to remember ‘green2heart’ then it is to remember a full password for all these different sites, or at least it is for me.

While I wouldn’t suggest something like this for sensitive sites, such as banking, I’d recommend it to those of us whom have a hard time trying to remember passwords for our many many sites. I’ve tried it myself for my email accounts and for my Raymond.cc forum account, and if you can’t tell, haven’t lost anything yet. The only flaw to these cards is if you loose them, you’ve lost your passwords… though Your PasswordCard has a 16 character string to bring back a copy of your card.

From what I’ve seen across the net, at present, there are two services that do this. One is offered by the creators of Shields Up!, the Gibson Research Corporation and is meant more for disposable passwords. It can be found here and is completely customizable to how you see fit, adding more or less security. The other option, Your PasswordCard is meant for more permanent passwords and accounts. I’d suggest you follow exactly what each site suggests and make sure to keep the password cards on your person, rather then leaving them lying around. Other then that, like I’ve said before, this is just one more option to help secure your computers and your accounts, and should be part of a layered regiment anyone should follow.

Our Malaysian ISP TM Net has done it again. I believe many Malaysians are experiencing problems in signing in to Windows Live Messenger with almost everything connected with Microsoft, including its main site is either not loading, or taking a very long time to load. In fact there are a lot more international websites that couldn’t load and I had to refresh a few times to get in. Even if you get to log in to MSN and try to send a message, it will tell you that your message cannot be sent to the recipient. Fortunately there are local proxies that we can use which allows us to access most of the sites that Streamyx is having trouble loading.

Since there is nothing much we can do about the hopeless case of TM Net, but we still need the Internet. I know I can’t survive without it and I had to look for methods which allows me to continue surfing the web and also log in to instant messengers. VPN is able to help us access those inaccessible or blocked websites and connect to instant messengers. Previously I’ve introduced HotspotShield and AlwaysVPN but AlwaysVPN has became a paid service. If you don’t like using HotspotShield because it forces advertisements at the top of your browser, here are 2 more free VPNs that you can try using.


Recently Duckieman has posted about UltraVPN in forum and saying that it is fast and there is no bandwidth limitation. I noticed that the download speed is capped at around 60KBps per thread but the limitation of the total download speed is 300KBps. Let’s say I download a file from a website and it is going around 60+KBps. But if I use a download manager to download the same file by splitting it into 5 download threads, I can get a maximum download speed of 300KBps.

To use UltraVPN, all you need to do is create a free account and then download the UltraVPN software. Currently UltraVPN service is free. The administrator of UltraVPN said that we don’t need to pay anything to use UltraVPN. If they are going to make people pay for the service someday, it would be 10€ per year which I think it’s very cheap! UltraVPN server is located in France, so you’ll be getting a France IP address.

Another free VPN service would be Alonweb.

From what I’ve tested, Alonweb is strictly for browsing purposes only and it has a lot of limitations. There is a 1000Mb bandwidth limit per month and SMTP port 25 is blocked to prevent spammers from using this service to send out emails. Other than that, torrent does not work and you can only download files that is smaller than 5MB. If you try to download any files bigger than 5MB, you will get the error “The request or reply is too large”. The IP address that you’d be getting is from Netherlands.

Let’s hope that these free VPN service does not end to be a paid service. If you’re looking for paid VPN service that allows you to download torrent without being throttled and access to any blocked websites, try BolehVPN.

Today one of my customer reported to me that two of his computers are infected by virus. When I asked what are the symptoms that made him think that his computers is infected by virus, he said there’s a text saying “Hacked by pokemon“. I find it funny because out of so many nicknames, a hacker actually chose “pokemon”! Anyway, I was eager to see what can this virus or trojan can do. Will it be as powerful as Brontok? Or will it be weak that I don’t even require anti-virus to remove it?

When I reached my customer’s place, he ran Internet Explorer, and the title bar did have an added text saying “Hacked by pokemon”.

I tried searching for this virus in Google and it’s not a popular virus because I couldn’t find much information about it. Even searching in Symantec’s website yield no results. Sorry as I couldn’t give you more information about this virus because when I was there, the virus was already removed using AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition.

The only problem is, the Anti-Virus didn’t restore back the Internet Explorer title bar text. Here’s how you can change Internet Explorer window title bar text.


Adding extra text in Internet Explorer window is not something new. I first saw this feature many many years ago when everyone was still using Internet Explorer 3! Follow the steps below to change your Internet Explorer window title bar text.

1. Go to Start -> Run
2. Type regedit and click OK.
3. Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
4. Right click, New and select String Value.
5. Type the string value as Window Title
6. Double click the Window Title and type the title you want in the value data.

To remove added text in Internet Explorer title bar, just delete the Window Title string value.

Without a doubt that ZIP compression is the most well known archive format until today even though there are other compression format such as 7z and KGB that gives better compression. When I was using Windows 95, the compression format that most people use was ZIP. Since it’s so popular, Windows XP started to support opening and extracting ZIP files without even the need to install WinZIP. However, RAR compression is picking up and it’s quite popular too because it can compress 8 to 30 percent better than ZIP!

Since RAR can compress better than ZIP, why people still use ZIP? For me, I still prefer to use ZIP file extension because majority of PC end user still uses zip file extension. And also most importantly Windows XP and above can open it. Sometimes I have files in RAR compression and if I want to send it to someone, I’d have to unrar it and then zip it.

Fortunately I no longer need to do that again because I can easily convert the RAR archive into ZIP. It can also support many other types of compression types.


ArcConvert is a free and easy to use tool which converts archives into different compression formats.

ArcConvert can convert the following archives: 7-ZIP /LZH /CAB /ZIP /ARJ /ACE /RAR /TAR /TGZ /GZ /Z /BZ2 /YZ1 /YZ2 /GCA /BEL /RPM /DEB/ BH/ Noa32 /HKI /PAQAR /SQX /HA /ZOO /UHARC /LFB /ZLIB /UCL /IMP /RS /SPL /APK /Arc /DZ /MSI /ALZ /PMA /PAQ7 /CHM /UDA /PAQ8 /Cryptonite /ISO /LZOP /BMA

To the following ones: ZIP, 7-ZIP, CAB, LHA, TAR, TGZ, BZ2, YZ1, BGA, RAR, ACE, NOA32, HKI, PAQAR, UHARC, YZ2, DZ, HA

ArcConvert is very easy to use. Just download, extract and run arc_convert.exe. Click the Open Archiv button to locate the archive file that you want to convert. Select the NEW archive extension that you want to convert and click Convert button. There’s also a Check button for you to check your archive file. Sometimes you’ll get “Archive ERROR” message but it can still be converted. There seems to be problem in converting ZIP to other extension. But I tried RAR to ZIP, and also 7-ZIP to ZIP, it works. I have contacted the author and he claims that there is no problem. What about you? Are you able to convert RAR to ZIP?

[ Download ArcConvert ]

Just yesterday my customer encountered a problem where his computer wasn’t able to boot in Windows. It just got to the point where it loading Windows with the bar and then the screen is blank. However, there’s no problem in booting into Safe Mode. My guess is if you’re able to boot in Safe Mode but not in Windows, chances are the drivers might be corrupted. I uninstalled the display driver from Safe Mode. True enough, I am able to boot in to normal Windows but without display driver. So everything looks big with the 640 x 480 resolution.

Now I need to download the latest display driver to install on to the computer. I asked my customer whether he has any idea what video card is on his computer and he didn’t had a clue. I can use a CD or USB flash drive that contains utility that can automatically detect the video card on that computer. There’s another method on how you can manually detect what video card you have by using the built-in Windows debug tool.


Before we start, I’d like you to remember not to include the double quotes when typing commands. Open up the DOS command prompt by clicking on “Run” in the START menu, and type “cmd” in the dialog window.

Type “debug” on the command line. This will start the debug prompt, indicated by the – at the beginnning of each line.

Now type: “d c000:0000“, and press Enter. There are some tutorial will suggest you to type “d c000:0010″ or “d c000:0040″ and etc… Either one will work but I prefer the 0000 because it’s the starting point and you won’t miss out any information. If the first shown contents doesn’t display any useful information, you can always type “d” and press enter to show the next content. To quit the debugger, just type “q“, press enter and you’re back in your DOS command prompt.

Now the debugger will show the contents of the address after typing the “d c000:0000″ command. You might have to take a look at the two or three next addresses to see some information about your video card. At the image below, you can see the commands being used at the yellow colored box.

Here’s a close up shot at the important information. As you can see, it’s written GeForce 6200.

I can say that this method works 80% of the time. Some graphic card such as Intel Extreme doesn’t display information when you debug the address above. On my Acer laptop, I have a ATI Mobility Radeon X700 but I could only find ATI information on the address and not the model. I would consider this the secondary method to detect video card if somehow I couldn’t use hardware information utility on that computer.

I had to create a short presentation when the church’s website that I was developing ready. Instead of using powerpoint slides or screenshot slideshow to do the presentation, I wanted to do something that has more impact. So I opt for flash intro which comes together with nice animation and music as well. When I finished creating the 1 minute flash intro, I did a test run on the computer that was connected to the projector. The problem that I faced was the computer that is connected to the projector doesn’t have an Internet connection and it only has Internet Explorer 8 without flash player.

I could easily download the flash player offline installer to a USB flash drive and install it on the computer but that would be the last alternative because I don’t want to install stuff on other people’s computer. Probably the easiest way to play the flash intro is to use a portable version of Firefox with Flash support.


All you need to do is go to a computer that has flash installed and copy the NPSWF32.dll file from C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash to the \FirefoxPortable\Data\plugins folder. MozillaZine Knowledge Base also did mention to copy the flashplayer.xpt file to the plugins or components folder but it is not really necessary because it is for scripting support. To play flash on Firefox Portable, only NPSWF32.dll is needed.

To make sure that flash is properly installed and loaded into your Firefox portable, type about:plugins at the URL bar and hit enter. You should see Shockwave Flash together with the filename and version listed on that page. Alternatively, you can also do that from the Add-ons Manager (Ctrl+Shift+A) > Plugins.

After the flash presentation, I simply deleted the Firefox Portable folder and the computer is back to the way it was, untouched.

When Bitdefender 2012 products were released, they had some major sale that went on for a while. I remembered buying a 1 year Bitdefender Total Security 2012 license for around $10 which I still haven’t got a chance to use it until today. When it comes to Bitdefender, they are one of the famous brands that help to keep users PCs, data, and identities safe from attack. Antivirus today is not only about protecting against viruses anymore as different types of threats has emerged. They had to offer protection against phishing, hackers, spams, and even social network, thanks to Facebook and Twitter. According to VB100 results, AV-TEST independent test reports and AV Comparatives, Bitdefender is currently rated as one of the top antivirus that offers really good protection against malwares. The new version comes in a sleek and black interface like the screenshot below.

The new Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 adds a couple of new interesting features which are Autopilot, Rescue mode, Virtualized Browser, Social Network Protection, Scan Dispatcher and Search Advisor.

Autopilot – Provides a hassle-free experience by making optimal security-related decisions without input from you
Rescue mode – Reboots your computer in a trusted environment, which is used for cleanup and restoration
Virtualized Browser – Isolates the browser from the operating system in a Bitdefender-provided environment to block web-based threats
Social Network Protection – Filters the links you receive from your Facebook and Twitter friends and monitors your privacy settings
Search Advisor – Gives advance warning of risky websites right in your Google and Bing search results
Scan Dispatcher – Triggers system scans when resource usage falls below a certain threshold to avoid any impact on your system’s performance

The Rescue Mode basically boots you in to a linux environment so you can scan your hard drive without Windows being loaded. This is very similar to rescue disk except that you don’t need to burn to a disc or USB. To get into Rescue Mode, go to the Antivirus panel, click Scan Now and select Rescue Mode from the drop-down menu. You will be prompted to restart your computer.

When I was benchmarking Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 today, I didn’t even see a single notification from the program at all because the autopilot mode is enabled by default. This mode is very useful to amateur users that don’t want to be constantly asked for a decision. This option can be easily disabled from the program’s main interface.

From what I’ve read, the Virtualized Browser is a part of the Bitdefender browser Toolbar. The system requirement page did say that it requires Internet Explorer 7 and higher but for some weird reason the toolbar wasn’t installed on my test machine’s Internet Explorer 8.

Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 should be able to keep your computer safe and secure from current threats but when it comes to performance, it is quite sluggish. Comparing Bitdefender with its previous product, the 2012 version are slightly slower. The time taken to launch an application, full hard drive scan, installation and uninstallation of 3rd party software, compression and extraction of ZIP files has increased while other tests stayed around the same numbers.

For those who are interested in using the latest Bitdefender Internet Security 2012, here is a new trick posted by Ant0ni0411 in forums on how to obtain a 1 year license for free. If you are looking for the Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 direct download links:

[ 32-bit | 64-bit | Homepage ]

Have you ever encountered a computer that is so badly infected by spyware and virus that the computer is so slow and you could hardly do anything on it? Fully booting in to computer takes like 15 minutes, then to install an on-demand antivirus program takes another 30 minutes and then to update the signatures takes another hour. Running a full scan would definitely take more than an hour. The computer should be cleaned from virus IF the on-demand antivirus is able to detect and remove the virus from computer. If not, you have to spend a few more hours hoping that the next on-demand antivirus that you’re going to install can detect the virus that’s causing the slowdown.

I used to go through all that but I no longer do that now. Whenever the computer is too slow to fix, I’d just pop in an antivirus rescue disk which is able to scan the computer for virus even without booting in to Windows. It is faster and more effective since the virus is not active when Windows is not running. I’ve already introduced 4 brands of free rescue CD which is Kaspersky Rescue Disk, Avira AntiVir Rescue System, F-Secure Rescue CD and BitDefender 2008 RescueCD. Here is yet another free antivirus rescue disk from Dr. Web called Dr.Web LiveCD which is very useful to scan and remove virus when the computer is very badly infected by virus.



Dr.Web LiveCD is an anti-virus emergency aid disk that would restore a system that became non-operational due to activities of malware. If a workstation or a server running Windows or Unix won’t boot from a hard drive, Dr.Web LiveCD will clean a system of suspicious and malicious files and will also try to cure infected objects.

All you need to do is to download the 66MB ISO image (minDrWebLiveCD-4.44.0.XXXXXXX.iso) from the link at the end of this article and burn it to a CD. Then boot up the computer with the CD by setting your computer as the first boot device. As loading starts a dialogue window will prompt you to choose between the standard and the safe mode. Make sure that the first option DrWeb-LiveCD is selected and hit the ENTER key. Once finished loading, you will be presented with a really cool nice looking screen that has Start Menu.

There are 2 ways to scan the computer using Dr.Web LiveCD. You can either select Start Dr.Web Scanner to start scanning the hard drive, or select Start XOrg to launch the graphical user interface version of the scanner. Before scanning, I’d suggest you to update the virus signature first by selecting Start Dr.Web Update from Start Menu.

Do take note that the Rescue CDs are NOT meant to replace the real-time antivirus program which protects your computer against malware every second. It is only used when the installed antivirus fails to detect and block the virus.

If you’ve never heard of Dr.Web and not sure how good it is, here’s a report that will give you a shock! In the latest October 2008 antivirus test conducted by Anti-Malware Test Lab, Dr.Web Anti-Virus 4.44 scored a perfect 100%, making it the only antivirus that receive the Platinum Malware Treatment Award. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 and Avast! Professional Edition 4.8 tied at second place. Again, very sorry to let the NOD32 fans know that Eset NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 completely failed the test at 0%! It didn’t even manage to detect the file of the virus on an infected system, although the parent file (distribution package) is detected.

Go ahead and download a copy of the free Dr.Web LiveCD as may never know when will your computer be infected by a virus that cannot be detected by the currently installed antivirus sofware on your computer.

[ Download Dr.Web LiveCD ]

On October 12, 2005, I talked about what is IP Address.
They are practically just numbers with dots (.) between them and also hard to remember.
Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) provides dynamic IP address which means that everytime you disconnect and reconnect back to the internet, you’ll get a different IP address than the previous one.

It’s pretty expensive to get a static ip address for running services such as FTP, WWW and etc…
Thankfully there are Dynamic DNS services!
Check out No-IP, The Dynamic DNS Leader which they claimed to be…
No-IP gets rid of the need to remember IP address, ever again.
Sign up is free and they also offers paid packages such as Plus, Enhanced, Squared and Free.
See the package comparison below.

I personally is using the FREE service and is considering to get the “Plus Managed DNS” since it’s only USD24.95/year.
I do a lot of remote access in different sites especially from my PDA to home and office computers/servers.

It’s useful, try it 🙂

I very rarely write about bittorrent because for the past few months I’ve only been getting my stuff from RapidShare file hosting. As you know, RapidShare has a storage capacity of several petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes) of files and you could almost everything there. I have a RapidShare Premium account and I used to get maximum download speed. However, for the past few weeks, the maximum download speed that I’ve been getting has been pretty bad, and now they’ve reduced the download limit from 10 gigabyte a day to 80 gigabyte a month. That’s like only 2.66gb of download per day! I have a 1.5mbps download speed and according to calculation, I can download as much as 12GB per day. RapidShare system is getting really absurd so I am turning to BitTorrent.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of uTorrent v1.8.1, got a torrent file from IP Torrents with 1051 seeders and only 34 leechers. With that numbers, I should be downloading at maximum speed but I am only getting less than 3kbps!

Double checked uTorrent settings and applied half connections limit patch, still no improvement. All this while I knew that my ISP TM Net Streamyx has been throttling P2P connections and I guess I’m their victim too. They claim to have a hardware to detect and throttle certain kinds of traffic such as p2p (for e.g. BitTorrent) in an effort to save their bandwidth that we have rightfully paid for. After spending hours trying to find out how to bypass bittorrent throttling, I found a simple solution.


Well the simplest way is to use VPN. VPN establishes an encrypted connection behind SSL security to encrypt BitTorrent and taking out traffic shapers. Last year I’ve already mentioned a few VPN companies such as XLCore, IdealVPN, HostCK and SecureIX but they’ve all closed down, leaving only BolehVPN that is capable to unthrottle your P2P connections. Currently BolehVPN has a total 14 servers located at Luxembourg, Sweden, United States and United Kingdom for you to choose from. If you want to watch online TV from Veoh or Hulu, simply connect to the US VPN.

Don’t look down on BolehVPN because the fact that they started operating since March 2007 until today already prove that they really “boleh” (Boleh means Can). I signed up for a 60 days VPN account to test it out and here’s a video showing how fast it hits my maximum download speed through BolehVPN. (This is my first attempt in making a video presentation, promise that it’ll be much better next time 😛 )

Another factor that contributes to the speed of bittorrent downloading is the amount of seeders and leechers. Some public trackers offers horrible amount of seeders which would make your download really slow. To solve this problem, BolehVPN provides access to a very popular private tracker (IPTorrents) with free leech! That means you can download without maintaining a good 1:1 ratio (although it’d be nice that you upload as well).

Other than providing VPN service, BolehVPN is also one of the very few providers of game servers in Malaysia. We’re actually in the midst of configuring the first ZombieMod server in Malaysia. Reason why I wanted a ZombieMod server hosted in Malaysia is because the routing done by our ISP TM Net is really bad and I get like 200-300 ping when playing CSS on servers overseas. If you want to check it out, here’s the IP and Port: 202.71.97.88:25555

Back to VPN, I have a US VPN account from Witopia that costs $39.99 per year but the connection is pretty slow and Veoh has blocked the IP saying “Veoh is no longer available in Anonymous Proxy”. I’ve also tested 1 month China VPN from BCRChina and it’s even worse as a lot of pages couldn’t load. So for a mere RM1 (US$0.25) a day at BolehVPN, you can download from BitTorrent with maximum full speed without being throttled and also watch online TV from Veoh, Hulu and etc by connecting to their VPN located in US (You have 14 VPN servers to choose from). A normal pirated DVD cost RM5 and Blu-Ray at RM12, I may as well spend the money on BolehVPN to have freedom in downloading whatever I want using P2P.

As part of the Christmas giveaway, I will be giving out 3 BolehVPN accounts valid for 125 days to 3 Malaysians. You must be subscribed to this website’s newsletter via FeedBurner or Feedblitz and then leave a comment. First 3 Malaysians that leaves a comment will get it. Readers from other country, please don’t be despair because I assure you that I have more giveaways coming very soon.

You can give BolehVPN a try if you’re a heavy P2P downloader that’s being throttled by your ISP. Just so you know, I gain nothing whether you subscribe to BolehVPN or not. I am just sharing with you based on my experience with BolehVPN.

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