Category: Online Services

2 Easy Ways to Create Secure and Private Chatroom • Raymond.CC
Gone are the good old days when mIRC used to be so popular that anyone with a computer connected to the Internet must log in to a chat channel to talk with people that they know or even to strangers. As time goes by, chatting on IRC has slowed down a lot and I hardly find any computers that I fix today that has mIRC installed. Today, most of us use instant messaging programs such as Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger to easily talk to our contacts in real time or even leave offline messages so that they can read the message when they get online.

Although instant messaging programs are commonly being used today, there are times that it won’t be possible to use if either party is not comfortable in revealing their account. One example is my previous server administrator that fully rely on ticketing system and they are slow in responding to it. On important task that involves down time, I want to be instantly notified when they’ve done their part so that I can immediately take over and do my part to reduce the downtime as much as possible. I certainly don’t want to be pressing the F5 key every 5 seconds to refresh the browser or configure AwayFind to notify me via voice call when there’s an update ticket. What I previously did was created a Meebo Me widget to a different domain and tell them to get access the special page so that can chat with me from their web browser without installing anything.

If you do not want to go through the hassle of installing the chat widget or is concerned about privacy, here are 2 quick and easy ways to create a secure and private chatroom.

1. Cryptocat
Cryptocat is an open source project that allows you to instantly create a secure chatroom. First you will need to enter the channel chat name or you can click the question mark icon to automatically generate a random name. Click the Enter button, followed by your nickname and then need to type randomly on your keyboard for a few seconds. Now that you’re created private and secure chatroom, you can get people to join in by sending them the URL on your web browser. They will be required to enter their nickname and also typing randomly on the keyboard for a few seconds to join the chatroom.

It is possible to send files by clicking on the red colored file icon located at the top right. Type in the recipient name and select the images or zip file that you want to upload. Below is a short video demonstrating on how Cryptocat can make your online lives more private.

2. ChatStep
ChatStep works similarly to Cryptocat where you can create a secure and private chatroom. The good thing about ChatStep is you are able to set a password to prevent any unauthorized users to join the chatroom if they managed to guess the room name. You can only share images by dragging and dropping an image file to the chatroom. There are a few simple options located at the sidebar to enable or disable timestamp, setting your chat bubbles to the right and aligning them correctly, and turning on/off sound upon receiving a new message.

During testing, I found that ChatStep is much faster than Cryptocat in the sense that it is more responsive. The chat messages are received nearly instantly after sending while Cryptocat takes a few seconds. However, Cryptocat provides more privacy functionality such as the ability to send private messages to certain members or if you want to put certain members in exclusion list so that they can’t see what your public message.

Cryptocat automatically wipes the data after one hour of inactivity while ChatStep does not store anything on their servers. Both Cryptocat and ChatStep uses SSL encryption (HTTPS) to encrypt the data before they are sent out. Anything that you typed in the chatroom including sensitive information such as password will not be stolen when someone is sniffing the packets on the network. However SSL encryption will not protect what you type on your keyboard from a hardware or software keylogger. You will need third party tools such as KeyScrambler to protect against software keyloggers.

If you still prefer to chat from an IRC server, you can ask the other party to use an online IRC chat client called Mibbit to connect to the server and join the channel that you’re on using just their web browser without installing any software or plugin.
Didn’t find what you want? The links below could help:

3 Free and Easy Ways to Chat With Visitors On Your Website

Easily Send Private, Secure and Encrypted Email Messages

akapost Keeps your Email Address Private and Secure

Stay Private and Secure Online with Hotspot Shield
July 29, 2012
Watch Geo-Restricted Online TV Channels with UnoDNS • Raymond.CC

When I discovered Tunlr, a free DNS service that allows you to watch US TV channels online for free without being in the USA, I went searching for an alternative in case if Tunlr services goes down and I urgently needed to watch a TV episode from CBS, Hulu or similar websites. I found another one called UnoDNS at UnoTelly.com by the company Unovation Inc. UnoDNS is quite similar to Tunlr where the user is required to change the DNS to the ones provided by them and they will be able to stream TV channels from their computer or mobile devices.

Unlike the free Tunlr that is ran by a few enthusiasts and does not guarantee the availability of their DNS services, UnoDNS is offered as a premium service where there are 2 paid packages (Premium, Gold) and 1 free limited package that does not expire. Other than that, they also have multiple DNS servers located in the America, Europe and Asia. Obviously connecting to a DNS Server closest to you will definitely have some speed improvements if compared to connecting to one that is at the opposite side of the world.

To start using UnoDNS, you will need to create a new account which will give you 8 days trial of UnoDNS Gold for free, and then automatically downgrades to the free package if you don’t renew it. Before you can start using UnoDNS, you must first set your current IP address as the active authorized network in UnoTelly Portal and then configure your network adapter to use the UnoTelly’s DNS servers.

Updating your IP in UnoTelly is the most troublesome step if you have a dynamic IP address that changes every time you reconnect. Recently UnoTelly has released a new IP Update API which is still in Beta that allows you to easily update your IP address to your account by simply visiting your secret IP update link without even having to login. It can be found by logging in to your account at UnoTelly Portal.

UnoTelly also have their own custom program called UnoHelper that helps you to easily activate UnoDNS on your computer without much hassle. All you need to do is download, install, enter your UnoTelly login details to the program and click the Start button. I encountered quite a few problems when using UnoHelper such as the DNS settings was cleared and left blank which resulted in unable to load any websites and the program periodically hangs. Other than that, it wasn’t smart enough to automatically use the DNS server nearest to my location.

If you are using the free UnoDNS, accessing to websites that are not included in the free channels package will automatically redirect you to the UnoTelly’s website saying “Content Not Available. The media site you tried to access is not available to your current UnoDNS subscription”. I don’t think this is fair because non USA users are allowed to view some video clips or trailers on Hulu but UnoDNS completely blocks you from even accessing the website. You can however turn off UnoDNS by removing the DNS from your network adapter to prevent the automated redirect.

As previously said, the free UnoDNS does not expire but limited to only 14 channels to be viewed on computer. Premium that cost $4.95 per month has 48 channels while the Gold at $7.95 per month has 75 channels and can be allowed to used on both computer and other devices such as TV, mobile and tablet.

The video demo below shows how I wasn’t able to watch Hawaii Five-O from CBS website but later possible after changing to UnoDNS.

UnoDNS is a great alternative to Tunlr. However the signup is way too easy to abuse because it doesn’t even require a verification. You can simply enter a bogus or temporary email and password at the sign up page to instantly get a Gold UnoDNS membership valid for 8 days without even paying upfront.

Visit UnoTelly

Related posts:
Watch TV and Movie Online using P2P Technology
Watch FREE Internet TV from PC
Watch NBA Playoffs 2009 Live Streaming On Your Computer for FREE
Watch US TV Online for Free by Changing to Tunlr DNS
Watch NBA Finals Live for FREE Without Installing Any Software

Download Torrents to Dropbox Directly Without Using Software

I think it’s pretty safe to assume everybody has heard of BitTorrent, but if you haven’t, where have you been living? Although it’s much more infamous for distributing illegal content than anything else, it does have a number of quite legitimate uses. There are a quite a few large files such as Linux ISO’s that have been available on torrent as well as several games companies actually seeing the benefits and also using torrents for perfectly acceptable purposes of distributing their game patches and updates. Although I very rarely use torrents these days unless the file or patch is only available that way, it is still incredibly popular throughout the computing world.

Dropbox is also a highly popular form of cloud storage which you will most likely have heard of as well. It is a highly useful service and although the default amount of storage on offer is smaller than some other services such as Google Drive or Skydrive, there’s still enough there for the average user to store and sync a number of files across multiple devices. And it’s complete ease of use just adds to Dropbox’s attraction.

That is why this latest online service caught my eye after reading about it on TorrentFreak, because I can’t see any point of having a torrent client on hand as I use it so infrequently. But when the need does arise, there is a way to download torrents without using any software which sounds rather intriguing. The service is called Boxopus and it basically connects directly with your Dropbox account and then downloads the files from the torrent straight to it, no need for a torrent client on your PC. This obviously has other benefits such as the download can be synced to whichever computers are connected to the account, it will also be anonymous as you’re not the one downloading the torrent, Boxopus is, and also you can queue up more than one download while out or at work etc, and then have them ready to download or sync from Dropbox when you get home!

boxopus

Boxopus is currently available in an open beta state and is completely free and although it will become subscription based sometime in the future, there will still be free accounts with limited features. This will most likely be speed and/or the amount of traffic you’re allowed. The service is also being rolled out onto a number of torrent sites with the idea of making this a one click download.

To use the service, head on over to Boxopus and register for a new account. Once you have entered an email address and password, Boxopus will ask to connect with your Dropbox account. It will create a folder in your Dropbox called ‘\Apps\Boxopus’ and only has access to that folder because it uses the Dropbox API.

boxopus

Once that’s done, you will be in the Boxopus ‘My Downloads’ window and to get started, simply click the button to browse for a torrent file you have already downloaded to your computer. Then click the button to put it in your Dropbox. After confirmation, it will be added to your download list and awaiting the download to begin. At this time, there appears to be no limit on the number of torrents you can add into the list. Then let the downloads complete and go check the Boxopus folder in you Dropbox.

boxopus

There is an obvious drawback in that the size and amount of downloads are restricted by the amount of space in your Dropbox, so if it’s already 90% full, there’s not much room for torrents. Currently each friend you refer to Dropbox adds another 500MB to your account and a total of 16GB can be earned in total, bring the overall total to a possible 18GB.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Boxopus is experiencing a bit of trouble coping with the huge spike in new subscriptions over the last day or so and my test torrent is taking a while to start up. For occasional torrent users, this service could prove very useful as you can just set it off and come back later or even another day, but major downloader’s might be better waiting to see how it takes off and whether it has any early teething troubles or ‘issues’ with either Dropbox or the various authorities…

Visit Boxopus

BitTorrent has been around for more than 10 years which is still alive and kicking today even though a lot of popular bittorrent tracker sites has shut down. Although BitTorrent is widely and commonly being used to distribute and download pirated materials such as cracked software or games, movies, TV episodes and MP3s, it is also being legitimately used to distribute the free Open Office, Ubuntu and many more… BitTorrent is merely a technology used to distribute files on the Internet and should not be automatically linked to piracy.

A lot of networks and even ISP are blocking or throttling users from downloading using BitTorrent because it is capable of sucking up the whole bandwidth, leaving very little or no bandwidth at all for other users. However if the BitTorrent client is properly configured with proper limits, it wouldn’t cause such problems on the network but unfortunately it is not that simple to configure for most basic computer users. One way to bypass BitTorrent restriction is to use an online downloader such as BitLet which I have previously covered in the blog. Here is another online BitTorrent client alternative called ZbigZ.

Basically ZbigZ acts as middleman by helping you to download the file using BitTorrent and then offers it to you for download once it has finished downloading. If the file has been previously requested by other users, the file will be made available to you much faster because it pulls the file directly from the storage instead of re-downloading the file. Everything works on HTTP protocol on the end user’s side and only a web browser with a working Internet connection is needed to download a file from BitTorrent using ZbigZ.

To download BitTorrent using ZbigZ, you will either need to upload the torrent file that can be downloaded from the tracker website or paste the torrent or magnet link to the box, followed by clicking the Go button. ZbigZ will either queue the file or start downloading depending on the load of their servers and offers it to you for download once it has finished downloading.

There are some restrictions for the ZbigZ free users but the premium paid users has all the features enabled and without limits. You can view the ZbigZ comparison matrix between the free and premium users at their official webpage. ZbigZ’s website stated that the free users are limited to 150KBps in download speed but as you can see from the video demo above, I was only getting around 50KBps when my Internet connection can download a maximum of 500Kbps. Since it’s free, I believe the download speed is offered at best effort.

I was curious to test the Premium account unlimited download speed so I paid RM2 for a 1 day subscription and tried downloading the same Open Office file. The download speed for ZbigZ premium account fluctuates quite badly from 200-400Kbps on 1 download thread. There are no visible download links where I can copy and paste the link to a download manager to download the file with multiple threads, so I used URL Snooper to get the direct download link and then downloaded the same file using JDownloader with 3 threads. It still fluctuates but this time at around 400-500KBps.

ZbigZ Premium Download Speed

There are still room for improvements on the download speed for ZbigZ but it is definitely useful when you urgently need to download some files using BitTorrent from a network that you are connected to has placed a block on BitTorrent. Moreover you don’t even need to install or configure a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent, Vuze, BitComet on your computer.

Visit ZbigZ

There are a lot of free TV episodes that can be watched online by streaming it to your computer but mostly they are only available within United States. If you are not located in the US, try watching an episode in Hulu and it’ll show an error that says “We’re sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States” and also on CBS, it shows “The video you have requested is not available for your geographic region”. There are ways to bypass the restriction by connecting to VPN servers that are located in the US. Doing this will change your IP address to a US IP and giving you the same privilege as the users who are connecting from the United States. Unfortunately a lot of VPNs out there requires paid subscription while the free VPNs have limitations and restrictions.
Streamed within the United States
Here is an interesting method that I discovered which is easy to set up allowing you to watch US TV for free from your computer running Windows, Mac OS, Linux or devices such as AppleTV, iPad, iPhone, and Android by just changing your current DNS to Tunlr’s DNS without installing any software.

If you didn’t know, changing your DNS will not change your IP address and that is the same case for Tunlr. However, after changing to Tunlr’s DNS, you are able to bypass the geo-restriction implemented on most US TV streaming websites such as Hulu, CBS, Netflix, ABC, NBC, FOX allowing you to stream the videos. Tunlr is able to do this by only routing data that is related to video or music content providers which Tunlr supports while the rest are left untouched. You can find a few official get started guides on how to change the DNS address provided by Tunlr to your computer or device. Tunlr’s current primary DNS is 149.154.158.186 while the secondary DNS is 199.167.30.144.

Check out the video demo below on how I am able to watch TV episodes from Hulu by just changing to Tunlr’s DNS.

Using Tunlr DNS to stream video and audio is definitely fast because you are connected directly to the streaming servers. Unlike using VPN, the VPN servers act as an intermediary where the encrypted data is transferred from your computer to the VPN server to be decrypted, sent to the destination and routing whatever they got from the destination back to you.

Important notes on Tunlr:
1. After changing your primary and secondary DNS to Tunlr, make sure you restart your web browser to take effect or else it won’t work.
2. Tunlr is not suitable as a permanent DNS for your computer as it is made to allow streaming of US/UK video and audio. Try downloading a file and you’ll see that the download speed is limited to a 15KBps. Once you’ve finished streaming the audio/video, switch back to your original DNS settings to restore back the download and upload speed.
3. If Tunlr doesn’t work, please check their status page to see if their tunneling server is running. At the bottom of the page also shows if Tunlr is activated on your computer which means if you’ve set it up correctly.

There are no guarantee on Tunlr’s services because it is developed and ran by a few enthusiasts. If their DNS service is down, just wait for it to get back up. There’s no registration required, no advertisements by them, and they don’t even accept donation.

Power Tip: Since Tunlr’s DNS contains very random IP address number unlike the Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 where everyone can instantly memorize, you can easily activate or deactivate Tunlr DNS by using the free and portable DNS Jumper tool. Click the plus button to add a new DNS to the list and enter the name together with the primary and secondary Tunlr’s DNS. Select Tunlr from the list and click Apply DNS.

Visit Tunlr

These days, you can barely browse a page on the internet without websites and businesses offering you newsletters advertising there products. Either that or offering the classic ‘We may give your details to a third party who will also bombard you with advertising emails’ tick box. You have to be so careful because some are opt-in and others are opt-out. Quite often they are rather conveniently difficult to spot and cleverly worded. If you have to, or accidentally sign up for something, then you get a constant stream of mails to your inbox. It might not be spam in the strictest sense, but sure feels like it sometimes.

Sometimes it may simply be websites you have signed up to for a promo and to receive a serial key. The common ones are the foreign language promo’s when you have to register on a website which isn’t in your native language. I still get the odd one in German or Chinese from things I registered for years ago. Also, a friend has made the ultimate mistake and let the kids use his email address a few times to register on websites and buy some things online. It’s no surprise the amount of unknown newsletters his account has been signed up for is now quite alarming!

If your email account gets rather cluttered up with these junk emails, it can take quite a bit of time and effort trying to get rid of them by checking each mail, searching for the instructions, and then going through the unsubscribe procedure. This is where a useful online service called Unsubscribr comes in handy. This free service can scan your ‘Inbox’ and ‘Trash’ folders, identify the newsletters or mail shots, and then allows them to be unsubscribed quickly and easily. Multiple unsubscribes can also been done at once with a few clicks.

Unsubscribr does currently have one major drawback in that it only supports Gmail, Google Apps, Me.com / Mac.com (iCloud), Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail at this time. They say they are working on adding more services so keep an eye on the site if your mail service is not included yet. It’s probably a good idea to use something like Gmail anyway when signing up for promo’s and other such offers, not your personal account.

The free version has a limit of being able to search back through mails up to five days old and can only scan the Inbox and Trash folders. For a one time fee of $2 this extends to thirty days old emails and allows scanning of any folder in the mail account although at the moment this is limited to single domains only. To get started, visit the Unsubscribr Website, enter your email address into the box and click ‘Start‘.

After that, you will be asked for permission for the service to access your email account and will be redirected and asked to sign in if you’re not already. The website does state no usernames, passwords or mail addresses are stored on their servers and OAuth is used to access your account, as well as also encrypting communication between themselves and the mail provider. Have a look in the FAQ for more information.

The options windows will have only one option for the free user which is a tick box to exclude social media notifications. Click ‘Begin Scan’ and your emails will then be processed. Once the scan is finished, a new window will be displayed with all the messages that have been identified as newsletters or coming from mailing lists.

If any message has the option of a tick box, clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ button and then ‘Just unsubscribe me’ is all that’s needed. ‘Unsubscribe and delete all’ will also delete the messages from your account. This sends an email on your behalf to remove you from the list. Messages with no tick box mean an extra step may be needed after clicking the button. This may simply be a confirmation page to say you have been removed from the list, or might redirect to the related website where you might have to click on a button or link to finish the process. Multiples can be selected, simply tick all you require and click the unsubscribe button above the list.

It’s worth reminding you that a lot of the time, unsubscribing is not always instant and you may continue to receive messages for periods of up to 28 days and beyond in extreme cases.

Unsubscribr isn’t perfect, for instance it missed a couple of messages I had in the trash folder which wouldn’t be missed if they were never heard from again. That said, this service is not many months old and hopefully detection can be optimised further and more mail services are added in future.

Website

Have you ever wanted to monitor a web page or URL and then automatically get notified when the page is updated? Probably you are using some software that you cannot live without and it has a terrible bug. You’ve reported the bug to the author of the software but is only promised to be fixed within 1-2 months time. Manually checking the website or changelog page daily is just a waste of time. Or perhaps you would like to get notified when a raffle is running on our website so you won’t miss out any chances in winning a free license. Website-Watcher, in my humble opinion is one of the most powerful if not the most powerful webpage monitoring software but it is a shareware and requires to run on a computer with an internet connection. If you don’t want to install a software just to monitor one or a few web pages for changes, you can give ChangeDetection a try.

ChangeDetection is a page change monitoring and notification services offered for free to internet users worldwide since 1999. All you need to do is specify the website page that you want to monitor and your email address for them to send the notification when ChangeDetection detected changes on the monitored website page.

Only text from the monitored webpage will be detected as changes. However text that are pulled from an external text file or through javascript will not be counted as changes to the page being monitored. HTML tags, images and flash content are also ignored. One of the biggest problem when monitoring a webpage is when current date is being automatically embedded to the page which will trigger a false change detection. Fortunately you can enable the “sizable change” option when adding/editing the webpage for monitoring so that you will only be notified when there are more than just single words or numbers changing. It is also possible to set ChangeDetection to only notify you when text are added or removed.

Change Detection Options

You are able to easily identify the changes on the monitored page because ChangeDetection strikes out the text that are removed while highlight the text that are added. The summary of the monitored page also shows the amount of new words, deleted words and the percentage changes. Here is one example of a monitored page of LastPass Release History page by ChangeDetection.

ChangeDetection

It seems that there isn’t a limit to the amount of webpages you can add to ChangeDetection for monitoring. The only con about ChangeDetection that I can think of is it checks the monitored URL once a day which means it is not suitable for use if you require an instant notification when the page is updated.

Visit ChangeDetection

Quickly and Easily Share Computer Screen with Screenleap • Raymond.CC

A video demo is obviously much better if compared to a step-by-step instructions in text with screenshots. However, the video demo has to be recorded in a comfortable level of clarity so that the viewer is able to easily see what is on the video. Other than that, creating a video demo is also more time consuming because you need to edit the video by fast forwarding or cutting off useless frames, adding overlays to censor some parts that you don’t want to show and uploading it to a video hosting site such as YouTube. A much convenient method is to just share your screen in real time to the other party probably to show the error that you’re experiencing or a demo on how to configure some settings on a third party software.

There are many software that we can use to allow other people to view our computer screen and one of my favorite is TeamViewer. However TeamViewer requires to download a software to run it on a computer where some users may not be comfortable in doing that. Probably one of the easiest method to share your screen is by using Screenleap. Screenleap is an online service where both the viewer and sharer don’t need to install any software to view and share the computer screen.

Screenleap is a free service that makes sharing your computer screen simple. The only requirement is the host computer that shares the screen will require Java to be installed while the viewer can be viewed from any web browser including tablets (iPad, Android), phones (iPhone, Windows Phone, Android) and desktop.

To share your screen, all you need to do is visit screenleap.com from your web browser and click the huge “Share your screen now!” button. Then click the Run button if you see the security information window. You will then get a Screenleap link containing a unique 9 digit code at the end of the URL that will allow the viewer to instantly view you screen upon opening the link from the web browser. You can click the More sharing options link to email or text (US only) the link. The host can either share the entire screen or a inside a rectangle box that can be resized. The Pause sharing button allows the host to temporarily stop sharing what’s on the screen to the viewer.

Screenleap

The best part is the viewer can request to share his/her screen to the host by clicking the Share my screen button on the top right. The host will need to allow the viewer to be the new presenter by clicking the “Yes, view screen” button to change presenter. After changing presenter, the previous host will become the viewer while the viewer becomes the host.

Screenleap viewer

If you frequently use Screenleap, consider signing up a free account where you can get your own handle such as www.screenleap.com/raymond.cc instead of the 9 randomly generated numbers by getting 5 friends to join Screenleap. If you can’t convince 5 of your friends to join Screenleap, maybe you can create 5 fake accounts 😛

Here is a video demonstration of how easy and quickly you can share your computer screen using Screenleap.

Although Screenleap is dead easy to use, but I find it a bit slow as the viewer’s refresh rate is not being updated fast enough which could cause the viewer to miss some details during screen sharing. Screenleap’s servers seems to be located in the US, hosted by Amazon which will definitely be fast for all users in the US but probably slower for users from other countries. If you’re looking for a free, simple and fast method to share your screen, Screenleap is definitely a winner.

Visit Screenleap

Auto Captcha Entry in Firefox, Chrome and Safari with Rumola • Raymond.CC

I have been spending a bit of time everyday in reporting webpages that has copied or scraped content from my blog. Some people may think that it is fine to copy because there’s no wrong in sharing knowledge but they should at least write it in their own words together with a linkback and not just simply copying and pasting on their website. Writing an article can take hours to even days to complete depending on the level of difficulty in research while it takes less than 10 seconds for the other person to reproduce it on their website. Not only it is unfair to the original author who written the article, they are also polluting the search engine with the same duplicate content, possibly causing penalties to the original author by Google.

There are a couple of steps involved in order to report the webpages to Google which is to search for the links, check to confirm if the webpage still contains the copied content, compile and sort the list of URLs according, finally filling up and submitting an online form. I have been constantly trying to improve the steps by automating them as much as possible to save time.

Before I can submit the online DMCA form to Google Web Search, I must first complete the captcha test by typing the two words shown on the box. The CAPTCHA test is meant to prevent automated submission by robots so that only real humans can legitimately submit the form. The Google Web Search DMCA form uses reCAPTCHA system where it consists of two words and to be honest some of them are really hard to read.

reCAPTCHA recognition

The most annoying part is when I got the captcha wrong even after spending some effort in trying to type in the correct letters and numbers that is displayed to me. I don’t mind solving CAPTCHA once or twice but it is really mentally challenging if I needed to continuously solving them. There are some paid services for automated captcha recognition and mostly they are used to integrate into software via API but I needed to automatically solve the captcha from the web browser.

Fortunately I found Rumola, probably the only online service for now that offers automated captcha recognition from the web browser via extensions. That means if you land on any webpage that requires you to solve the captcha by typing the letters and numbers that appear in the image, Rumola does it for you when you start filling up the form. Rumola doesn’t crack the captcha but instead the captcha that is shown to you are automatically sent to them for manual processing by real humans and then send it back to your browser.

To use Rumola for automated typing of CAPTCHA in your web browser, you will need to register a free account followed by installing the extension. The extension doesn’t require any configuration and will be automatically bound to your account via browser cookie. The video below is a demo of Rumola automatically recognize and type in the CAPTCHA words when I start to fill up the form.

After testing Rumola with reCAPTCHA, I find that Rumola is quite accurate and takes about 20 seconds to help me type in the 2 words to solve reCAPTCHA. If you managed to fill up the form quicker than Rumola solving the CAPTCHA, you can click on the CAPTCHA box to manually enter the CAPTCHA. Rumola is a paid service and they do offer a free trial account for you to test their service. The trial account comes with 10 credits and you can top up 50 credits for $0.99 or 150 credits for $1.95 both valid for 6 months. Solving each captcha costs 1 credit. If you have a task that constantly requires you to fill up captcha boxes in your Firefox, Chrome or Safari web browser, then Rumola is a huge time and effort saver with only a fraction of cost. Currently Rumola supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari but you can sign up for the notification where you will be notified when they begin supporting your browser.

Visit Rumola

Detect Software Errors and Malware Infections with Kaspersky GSI

Kaspersky GetSystemInfo (GSI) is a very useful support tool often used by Kaspersky Lab engineers to collect system information in order to troubleshoot technical issues. It collects a wealth of information about the users system which can then be analyzed to detect incompatible software, detect possible known and unknown malware on your computer, and also detect program function errors. The Kaspersky GSI tool has been in development for several years and contains many features that make the interpretation of possible problems on a users system easier for both the user themselves and anybody offering technical support.

The Kaspersky GSI tool works along similar lines to Trend Micro’s HijackThis which scans your computer and then creates a log file. The GSI log file though, is massive and far more comprehensive in comparison (typically over 1MB) as the tool is set up to scan just about every corner of your system. The log file that was created on my computer contains more than 15,000 lines and it would’t be easy to analyze manually. This is where the online part of this tool comes into play thanks to the GSI parser. Once uploaded, it takes all of the information in the log file and parses the data into an easily readable tabbed webpage. This functionality means that users with limited computer experience have a better chance to troubleshoot an issue on their own.

Only 3 simple steps are required to analyze your computer with GSI; download the tool, run it, and then upload the results to view online.

1. Download the latest version of Kaspersky GSI. There are 2 versions available when you click the Download link at the top. The latest version 5 is for XP, 2003/2008, Vista and Windows 7/8. As for version 3, this is compatible with Windows 2000, NT and 98.

2. Run the GetSystemInfo (GSI) tool and click the button to create a report log file. By default, the settings are set to collect recommended information from the system. This can be changed by going into Settings and moving the slide bar, or manually changing the scan criteria. For example, setting the slider to maximum will also include scanning the \System32, \Windows and \System32\Drivers directories and also Services modules.

If you want to scan your computer for malicious software, it is recommended that you change the setting to maximum before running the utility as malware often installs itself in those locations that are not included in the Recommended setting. Before running the GetSystemInfo utility on the system, it is recommended to close all other running applications first.

3. Once the GSI tool has completed, which could take a few minutes if the maximum setting is used, a webpage will open telling you the report log has been created with a link to give to anyone providing technical support. To have a look at the report yourself, there is a link in the lower left corner “if you want to analyze it yourself (for experts only), click here“. Or you can upload the report log file to GSI Parser at a later date. The report file is automatically saved to your chosen location in a zip archive. Within a few seconds, GSI Parser will show you the report log file in an easily readable tab format.

If GSI found any possible malwares on your system, you should see something like this in the summary screen:

You can also sign up for a free account at Kaspersky GetSystemInfo where you can start rating the files and also write comments. Kaspersky GSI is a useful utility and resource for identifying a number of system issues not just security threats. But just like any other utility that scans and analyzes your computer, it is recommended that you have at least a reasonable level of experience in computers to analyze the log file and interpret the results.

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