For the uninitiated, Flock is an open-source social network browser based on the same codebase as Firefox (Mozilla/Gecko). Because of this it has the same speed and security of it’s better known cousin. I had used Flock for a short period about six months ago so I thought it was time I revisited the project, and do a mini review of the current features.

After visiting flock.com and downloading the latest version, you find during the setup (not surprisingly) that if you’re used to Firefox, there are going to be no great surprises here. After the install has finished you are given the option of importing bookmarks from the other browsers on your system (and has support for the current front runners – IE, Firefox and Opera). Once finished you’ll be surprised at the clean and interesting look to the browser which does set it apart from Firefox – that, and of course, all of the extra goodies.

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—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.

Yesterday, I wrote an article on a project being funded in the UK to snoop on private netizens “just to make sure” they’re behaving themselves. I also touched briefly on some ways to protect yourself and keep your communications private. Well today, I’m going to go a little more into details on setting up a crypto system on your laptop or PC to make sure all your messages are only read by the people you want to read them.

OK – so you’re sat in front of your laptop eager to start. The package we’ll be installing today is called GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) which is a play on the original standard, which was initially introduced by a program called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). So first a quick outline of what PGP is, and how it works:

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£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?

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Think of the unhappiest times with your computer.. What happened during those times? What would cause your face to freeze and your jaw to drop? In my experience it has almost always been because data was lost. It’s normally the realisation that everything you had was gone – when you stare blankly at the computer for 5 minutes dumb-struck. Maybe you went into a folder in your My Documents that was, until yesterday, full of those really important files you were doing for work. Or maybe you went to power on your PC and you had one of those horrible error messages from Windows, that essentially means “your system has gone bye-bye.”

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Every now and again, two of my favourite subjects come together (No, not blackmail and hard discs) – Technology and Motorsports.

Formula 1 star of the McLaren-Mercedes team, Lewis Hamilton, has been the focus of a blackmail attempt by a man in Germany, named simply “Dieter.” Dieter somehow obtained a hard drive, that had supposedly been disposed of some months before, that contained documents and other personal information. For those who are unfamiliar with the McLaren-Mercedes scandal of last year, the team were found guilty of using secrets from another team to improve their own car – and this hard drive could possibly had more such evidence on it. Trying to sell the hard drive to the German motorsport magazine, “Bild”, Dieter was arrested by police after the magazine tipped off the authorities, as reported by the Daily Telegraph today.

So how do you properly and permanently remove sensitive information from your hard disc?

Remember – when you delete things in Windows the data is usually still there – just because you can’t access the information doesn’t mean somebody else won’t be able to. The very nature of deleting a file just means renaming the first character of the filename, to let the system know the space it takes up can be used for new files – and the data is still there until new files are written in the same place. And even if the space the file used to occupy is overwritten with different files, there are techniques that can be employed to find out what used to be on the surface of the disc. Once you know this, you need something a little better than the recycle bin in windows to remove your sensitive data, and there are three methods you can use to do it:

The first way is with a program that allows you to securely delete files – rather than by using the recycle bin in Windows, download Eraser. It has a drag and drop interface that allows you to do a multiple-pass wipe so that the bytes the file occupies get overwritten properly, making it practically impossible to retrieve the data that used to be your file. Amongst others, by default, it uses the “Gutmann” method of wiping that employees 35 separate passes of specially selected data to make sure nobody can retrieve the information, chemically, from the drive. This should be enough if you just need to remove the odd file that’s a bit sensitive. It is geared towards doing things in batches, so you could drag files you want to remove into the program and before you log out, process them all in one go. This takes care of single file deletes.

The second way is a little more abstract, and Eraser is up to the task of removing this type of data too. Remember when your files are removed, they aren’t actually erased, the space is allocated back to the system to write files into? Baring this in mind, all the files you’ve deleted previously, will have data scattered all over the drive, in places ready to be overwritten, but for whatever reason the system hasn’t got around to using yet. So the second method is to wipe your free space on the drive. Every byte that isn’t allocated to a file will be subjected to the same rigorous treatment, using the same methods.

When you’ve come to the point when you’re ready to throw the hard drive away and want to be sure there’s nothing left on it, the last method to remove data is to wipe the whole drive. And the best way to do this is to melt it down! Failing that, if you don’t have a kiln in your house, try DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke). Download DBAN, burn it to a CD, boot from that CD and you will be able to wipe any drive in the system with multiple passes of random data. Eraser, above, also supports wiping whole drives and can create a “Nuke Disc” to boot from. DBAN, however is a personal favourite, and I’ve never had problems with using it. This should securely remove the data – although of course, nothing is as secure or cool as melting it – plus you get the added advantage of doing something cool to video and put on youtube!

—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.

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.

I know what you’re thinking, it sounds like one of those websites that offer the "free download" and then you find out that it’s the product you’re going to have to pay for – not the download. A clever and annoying play on words..

Anyway, that’s not the case here. This truly is free. Windowblinds? Windowsblinds? We don’t need no stinking Windowblinds! That’s right, why should you pay for a 3rd party app like Windowblinds to skin your OS, when it’s already built right into XP?! The reason is, and you may not realise this, but why you normally have 2 or 3 skins in XP is because that’s how Microsoft want it (in an almost applesque sort of way.) And the reason you can’t install 3rd party skins in Windows is a file called "uxtheme.dll." This little file prevents any themes that aren’t signed by Microsoft from showing up in the menu and being used by the Windows XP GUI.

So you need a fix for this file. And it comes in the shape of the "UX Theme Multi-patcher." A program to undo what Microsoft did. Run it once and it will patch your "uxtheme.dll" file. After this is done (and you did read what the little box said, didn’t you?) Windows will try to warn you that a system file has changed. This is perfectly normal and you can safely cancel windows from trying to put the old file back. Once done, do a reboot and visit the following sites for some nice themes (I’ve included the one in the example to get you started.)

• UX Theme Multi-patcher
• "Cerulean Theme" from example
• ThemeXP.org
• XPTheme.info
• Belchfire
• Customize

Please bare in mind that you do this at your own risk – don’t blame me if you fry Windows. However, that being said I’ve never heard of anyone having problems installing this fix.. And if you want the original uxtheme.dll file back, just run the Multi-Patcher again.

Update: If you’ve installed Windows XP SP3, it will overwrite your patched ‘uxtheme.dll’ file. You have to amend it manually. To do this, boot into safe mode and replace the uxtheme.dll file in the Windows\System32 directory with this one. This is at your own risk, so always make backups first before messing with your system! I can say it worked a treat for me with no problems

Quite a quick post this one (which is testament to how easy it is) to show you how to share your iTunes library over the internet, without any complicated SSH tunnels, or port forwarding or anything – but still have it secure. Also, this method allows multiple remote connections with ease (as long as the computer hosting the iTunes library has enough upload bandwidth, of course.) How?

First things first, share your iTunes library on the host machine. Edit preferences, Sharing, Share My Library Over My Local Network (ticked.) Secondly – obviously – make sure you have iTunes installed on your work PC, or any other PC you want access to your iTunes library. And the second to last step – install Hamachi (google it) on both computers. Turn on Hamachi on both machines – create a new network on the host machine & connect to it using the client machine. Start iTunes on both PCs and bingo! You can even play protected content, just by authorising your works PC. Simplicity itself!