—This article supersedes the previous OpenDNS article, to bring everything up to date.—

I previously wrote an article about how to fix the search results that get thrown up by OpenDNS when you’re trying a quick search in Firefox’s address bar. However, if you use the Google Toolbar, you will have the same problem. There also appear to be issues with OpenDNS’s default behaviour (which perhaps should be an "opt-in" rather than an "opt-out"?)

It’s surprising how used to the Firefox address bar feature you get. I, for instance, just type “gmail” into the address bar and Firefox/Google gets me to where I want to go. Some people I know of have actually got rid of OpenDNS for this reason alone. Well all is not lost!

First things first, go to the address bar of Firefox and type about:config and hit return. You may be given a warning message, simply click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”. What appears is a list of the configurable variables that Firefox uses. Beware, messing with the wrong ones can break your browser. We’re interested in only one of them. In the filter box, type keyword. Double click the keyword.URL entry in the list and change the contents of the box that appears to http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q= click OK. And for those of us in the UK, just substitute the google.com with a google.co.uk.

Secondly, you’ll need to have an account with OpenDNS, so you can manage your network settings. For those of you that have a static IP it’s very simple, simply register your IP with OpenDNS, give it a friendly name (like Home Broadband or something) and you can start managing everything within minutes. If you do not have a static IP address, please read their section on Dynamic DNS first and then download a small program that notifies OpenDNS when your network address changes.

Once you have your IP address registered with OpenDNS, you can manage the settings yourself. Click on advanced settings for the network and make sure, right at the bottom of the page, Enable OpenDNS proxy is ticked. The OpenDNS proxy will allow Firefox address bar traffic through unscathed (hopefully) – but it only appears to work in combination with the Firefox fix above (at least in my case). You may also want to disable the typo correction (personal choice).

Anything you now type into the address bar of Firefox, if it’s not a valid website address, will be redirected to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. I’m Feeling Lucky, for the uninitiated, is a button next to Search on the Google homepage that you can use if you’re sure the first entry that’s going to be returned by Google’s normal search will be what you’re looking for. Firefox will now act exactly the same way when you type your search term into the address bar - bypassing that horrible (and annoying) OpenDNS search page.

The old fort, which it’s owner (Roy Bates) declared a principality - although the UK still claim it’s within their waters - was involved in hosting data off-shore, in an attempt to circumvent internet hosting laws in most countries.

For the last couple of days, however, the main website for "HavenCo" is not hosted on Sealand anymore. This almost certainly points to the end for HavenCo after a troubled recent history. Although the idea initially is pretty good, it’s such a niche market that the customer base must have been pretty small to begin with. Couple that with the reality that any traffic that flows through the Sealand servers, also flows through the UK, and it seems less and less attractive.

Personally, I’ve always seen Sealand as a bit of a quirk. And once the novelty wears off (worn off?), it’s just an old heap of bricks in the middle of the channel.

£1 Billion has already been ploughed into a monitoring system in the UK that could make every user of technology in the country a target for Big Brother.

The system, based in a building in Benhall, and reported by TechSnake in July, is being funded to intercept all email, SMS and internet traffic to the tune of £12 Billion, once running. Reported in a post on the This Is Gloucestershire website, the move has caused councillors and MPs to question the Government’s morality.

I, personally, can’t believe what is happening. In a modern society too. It is the civil right of every person to have private communications with each other without the government spying over their shoulders. This typical attitude by government agencies is of course wrapped up in the “threat of terrorism” cliché, that is starting to wear just a little too thin. Preventing terrorism is important, but not to the detriment of every other law-abiding citizen. The fishing net mentality is ridiculous - the process is already in place whereby a government agency can get a court order to track individual’s messages for potential terrorism involvement - the government doesn’t need to employ this level of privacy invasion. So what can we do about this - in the UK and globally?

Read the rest of this article…

China has just overtaken the US, as the country with the largest online population in the world. China, according to sources, has a massive 253 million people surfing the net.

They may be online, but as we know, they aren’t exactly experiencing the net to it’s “fullest” shall we say, with censorship and government restrictions in place. But on the plus side, at least they’re enjoying their Great Firewall of China filtered content quickly - 95% of connections are on broadband or better. The world’s faster growing economy is starting to become the world’s most tech-savvy community too.

Photo source: Flickr

—Superseded by a newer OpenDNS article, written to bring everything up to date. —

It’s a common question, and most people don’t really look for the answer. If you make the switch to using OpenDNS, all of a sudden the feature of typing anything into your address bar in firefox, and being redirected to the best-match page from google doesn’t work. And it’s surprising how used to that feature you get. I, for instance, just type “gmail” into the address bar and Firefox/Google gets me to where I want to go. Some people I know of have actually got rid of OpenDNS for this reason alone. Well all is not lost! Don’t change your settings just yet - you can make a simple tweak in Firefox to make it all better.

First things first, go to the address bar of Firefox and type about:config and hit return. You may be given a warning message, simply click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”. What appears is a list of the configurable variables that Firefox uses. Beware, messing with the wrong ones can break your browser. We’re interested in only one of them. In the filter box, type keyword. Double click the keyword.URL entry in the list and change the contents of the box that appears to http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q= click OK and you’re done. And for those of us in the UK, just substitute the google.com with a google.co.uk.

Anything you now type into the address bar of Firefox, if it’s not a valid website address, will be redirected to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. I’m Feeling Lucky, for the uninitiated, is a button next to Search on the Google homepage that you can use if you’re sure the first entry that’s going to be returned by Google’s normal search will be what you’re looking for. Firefox will now act exactly the same way when you type your search term into the address bar - bypassing that horrible OpenDNS search page.

Firstly, I would like to say that using a wireless network which is not yours, will probably land you in some trouble. But, hey, it’s not for me to judge, I’m just here to provide the information!

After very recently looking for some admin-like answers to some wireless network problems I was having, I found this article that details in a Make Magazine or Instructables style, how to create a “Predator” wireless access point sniffer.

The Predator is a hacked router and huge wireless receiver, plus a tripod. It will scan the surrounding area for the strongest unencrypted, or “open” wireless network and repeat it into your network. And because of the over-average size of the receiver, you should be able to get a good signal as long as you have a fairly good line-of-sight. So you will have free wireless internet, while still retaining control of your network security. Very cool, but remember it might be illegal depending on where you live and laws in that country etc. Also, I wouldn’t suggest sticking the thing right next to the window as in the pictures, unless you want the SAS zip-lining into your lounge after reports of a sniper in your building!

In an article on the Register, O2 have basically admitted that everyone who uses their 3G service is automatically placed on 128Kb/s, rather than the theoretical maximum of 384Kb/s. It gets better though: All of you with a personal mobile with 3G won’t ever get any more. Corporate customers can go to O2 and get it upped to 384Kb/s, but it’s still apparently under their terms.

This just seems to echo how the industry treats people’s internet access in this country. The companies like Tiscali and Virgin Media, and others - now including O2 - think they have the right to restrict usage just because their infrastructure can’t handle the demand. Personally if it’s all about money, I would rather pay a little bit extra to guarantee a decent connection, rather than all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Read the full article here.

In another anti-Microsoft post (God I’m getting good at these recently) it appears Microsoft’s email servers are down.

Just remember, don’t fret if you see the “Service Unavailable” message when trying to access your hotmail account - maybe it’s fate just whispering gently in your ear - “time to move to gmail…”

That nasty judge. The registrar had no choice but to remove the entries it has for wikileaks.org so people couldn’t get to the site anymore after his ruling. Well, you can add your own entry, locally to any system so you can always get to wikileaks.org. How? Well you need to change a file called “hosts”

In Windows, the hosts file is found in your Windows directory. To be precise it’s Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc (assuming your windows installation is in windows. If it’s in WINNT or something, then just change the path accordingly.)

In Linux or Unix, this file is normally found in /etc (the etc directory in root.)

In Mac OSX you can find the file in either /private/etc or, like Unix, the /etc directory.

So you know where the file is, now what? Open it up in the text editor of your choice and edit the file. The easiest way to open it, as it doesn’t have an extension (like .txt) is to open the the text editor first - notepad, vi or whatever - then navigate to your folder of choice and open it. Now, I think a quick networking 101 is required:

A domain name, such as google.com, is just a name pointing to an IP address. The domain names are just there for our benefit, not the internet’s, the server’s or the router’s. Just for us - after all It’s much easier to remember a catchy name like skymonkey.org, than it is to remember a string of numbers. So that’s where name servers & DNS step in. A name server holds a big list of domain names matched against IP addresses. So when you type in google.com in your browser, the first thing it does is get in contact with a nameserver and try to make sense of it - to convert it to something the browser, rather than you, understands. The nameserver will either return the IP address associated with google.com, or direct the browser to the next place that it thinks will know. And so on, until the browser has an IP address to connect to. The connection happens and you view google.com, or skymonkey.org in all it’s glory. So how does this hosts file fit in with the scheme of things then?

The hosts file you see before you (hopefully), is the first thing your computer looks at when trying to resolve domain names. Before it will go to a nameserver it will check it’s own hosts file for any entries there. If it finds a positive match for a domain name you’re looking for then bingo, it will serve that IP address up first. Now if you know that a certain registrar in America has removed the entries for a certain domain name, you can use your new-found knowledge to add you own entries for - er-hum, shall we say “wikileaks.org”

So the data to add? Probably the simplest part. Go to the bottom of the file and create a new line (just hit return or whatever.) Then type in the following IP address: 88.80.13.160 hit the tab key, or hit the space bar (to create a gap) and then type www.wikileaks.org

And that is it! All done. Save the file - open up your browser of choice and type wikileaks.org into the address bar. Now sit back and enjoy the smug grin on your face as you realise the system hasn’t stopped you or others from exercising your freedom of speech.

There’s a serious “Geek alert” on this article. If you don’t know what IPv4 or IPv6 is then I suggest you look away and read the next article.. For those who are still reading, IPv6 address have been implemented on almost half of the root servers which means that IPv6 systems can communicate with each other without any legacy IPv4 stuff being used.

Why do we care? Well the number of IP addresses that are currently allocated on the internet is going to hit a very real limit in about 3 years time. This is because the pool of IP addresses available within IPv4 is nearly all used up. Of course back when the IPv4 standard was drawn up in the 70’s, it was never thought that there would be a need to address more than 4 billion computers on the internet. Thankfully with the IPv6 standard, which has had a real push for implementation, that upper limit of IP addresses goes up by a factor of 4 - a number roughly equivalent to 3 followed by 38 zeroes. Hopefully this will be enough for another 30 years! [SHOW ME]