I know I found this article useful.  I hope you do as well.

8,359 13

Ref: http://lifehacker.com/5865287/how-do-i-sync-my-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-touch-with-a-new-computer-without-wiping-out-all-my-data

How Do I Sync My iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with a New Computer Without Wiping Out All My Data?

Ref: http://lifehacker.com/5865356/the-best-antivirus-app-for-windows

The Best Antivirus App for Windows

Windows has more antivirus programs than we can count, but we keep coming back to Microsoft’s own offering, Security Essentials. It’s easy to use, lightweight, and does everything in the background, so you rarely need to interact with it.

Microsoft Security Essentials

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Download Page

• An extremely easy to use interface from which you can manually update definitions, see your recently detected items, and schedule scans
• Set the default action for different alert levels (i.e. remove or quarantine the offending file)
• Real-time protection that scans all your downloads, monitors file activity, and more.
• Exclude certain file types, locations, and processes from a scan
• An heuristic scanning engine that helps it detect viruses not in its definitions

Microsoft Security Essentials solves every problem you’ve ever had with antivirus. It’s super lightweight, easy to use, and will update and scan without you ever knowing it was there. Its interface is dead simple to use, so you can set up schedules and change your settings when you want, but you really don’t need to do much. Set it up, forget it, and stay protected. It’s amazing it took antivirus apps this long to get this simple.

MSE’s only real downside is that it while it’s pretty darn effective, it isn’t the most effective program at catching viruses, at least according to AV-Comparatives’ report. Still, it’s one of the most effective programs out there, especially among free programs, and coupled with a bit of common sense, should keep you more than protected from any malware floating around the net. It also doesn’t have any email, IM, or other extra scanners, but we personally consider a lot of those things bloatware. There’s a fine line between feature-filled protection and something that’s just going to slow your system down more than a virus would. Practice safe browsing and emailing and you’ll get the best of both worlds.

When it comes to free options, Avira is probably the best competitor to Security Essentials. AV-Comparatives found it to be the most effective free program out there, at least with heuristics set to “high” (which isn’t without downsides, mainly a higher possibility of false positives). Like Security Essentials, it isn’t super feature-filled, and it isn’t nearly as lightweight as Security Essentials either (nor is the interface as easy to use). If you prefer something a tad less aggressive, ESET NOD32 is a great application that’s almost as simple as Security Essentials, though not quite. All three of these are great options for free antivirus.

We’d be remiss not to mention Avast and AVG, two longtime favorites of our readers. However, both have quirks that make it hard for us to recommend them over the above options—they aren’t quite as effective in finding viruses and malware, and both have their own bloat and annoyances (like Avast’s once-a-year registration requirement) that put them at the bottom of our list.

Some paid alternatives, like F-Secure, Norton, and McAfee Total Protection are better at finding viruses and malware than free options, but they do so at the cost of your system resources (and your wallet). We personally don’t think they’re necessary in a home setting, as long as you use good browsing habits, but if you want to protect yourself against every possible virus or theoretical piece of malware you could get, they might be the way to go.

In the end, the best possible antivirus you can have is good browsing practices (you know, in case I haven’t mentioned that enough). They’re more effective than any antivirus software out there, and they won’t put any kind of drain on your system resources, money, or stress level. Keep Windows and applications like Flash updated, stop downloading questionable files, and just practice good common sense. If you do, you’ll probably have to deal with your antivirus program very little.

There are more antivirus programs out there than we can even count, but these are probably the best out there right now. Many of you undoubtedly have your own favorites, some that we might not have even listed—so share your favorites with us (and why they’re your favorites) in the comments. If you’re interested in more comparisons between each program’s effectiveness, we highly recommend checking out AV Comparatives’ summary report from last year. It has a wealth of information for those looking to install antivirus on their system.

Please take a moment and fight the new law that will change everything about your privacy on the Internet.

This is not an attempt to support online piracy.  Your IT Wizard LLC does not condone to the illegal transfer of protected software or media.  This is an attempt to protect your rights.  They sugar-coat this bill into looking like it will “save money” and protect data.

The truth is, it’s another eye into your Internet use with EXTREME repercussions if you are caught doing anything you shouldn’t be.

LEARN MORE!  IT’S UP TO YOU TO TAKE ACTION!

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Petition Reference: http://americancensorship.org/

This is a must read from lifehacker.com. Your It Wizard LLC does not condone to illegal file sharing but we do support our right to privacy and the use of P2P torrents. We obtain a large majority of our software from venders via torrents.

Ref: http://lifehacker.com/5863380/how-to-completely-anonymize-your-bittorrent-traffic-with-btguard

How to Completely Anonymize Your BitTorrent Traffic with BTGuard

If you’re using BitTorrent without taking special measures to hide your activity, it’s just a matter of time before your ISP throttles your connection, sends you an ominous letter, or worst case, your ISP gets a subpoena from a lawyer asking for your identity for a file-sharing law suit. Here’s how to set up a simple proxy to keep your torrenting safe and anonymous.

We’ve talked about how to boost your BitTorrent privacy before, but those measures aren’t quite enough anymore to keep you anonymous, because copyright holders are getting more vigilant at tracking down people who share their content. Heck, you don’t even need to be doing anything illegal, either. Maybe you just want to keep Big Brother out of your business and throttling your connection. Either way, if you really want to keep your activity private, your best bet involves routing your BitTorrent connection through an external service. BTGuard is a BT-focused proxy server and encryption service, and it’s my service of choice. Below, I’ll explain what it does, how it works, and how to set it up to privatize and anonymous your BT traffic.

How BTGuard Works

When you download or seed a torrent, you’re connecting to a bunch of other people, called a swarm, all of whom—in order to share files—can see your computer’s IP address. That’s all very handy when you’re sharing files with other netizens, but file sharers such as yourself aren’t necessarily the only people paying attention. Piracy monitoring groups (often paid for by the entertainment industry either before or after they find violators) also join BitTorrent swarms, but instead of sharing files, they’re logging the IP addresses of other people in the swarm—including you—so that they can notify your ISP of your doings. A proxy (like BTGuard) funnels your internet traffic—in this case, just your BitTorrent traffic—through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from a server that can’t be traced back to you instead of the address that points to your house. That way, those anti-piracy groups can’t contact your ISP, and your ISP has no cause to send you a harrowing letter.

But wait, can’t the piracy groups then go to the anonymizer service (BTGuard) and requisition their logs to figure out that you’re the one downloading the new Harry Potter? Theoretically, yes, but the reason why we chose BTGuard is because they don’t keep logs, so there’s no paper trail of activity leading back to you. All the piracy monitors see is BTGuard sharing a file, and all your ISP sees is you connecting to BTGuard—but not what data you’re downloading, because it’s encrypted.

If you subscribe to an ISP that throttles BitTorrent traffic (click here to see the worst offenders), and aren’t using an anonymizer service, you have an additional problem. Your ISP can still see what you’re doing, and if they detect that you’re using BitTorrent—even if you’re using it for perfectly legal purposes—they’ll throttle your connection so you get unbearably slow speeds. When you encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, your ISP can’t see what you’re using your connection for. They’ll see that you’re downloading lots of information, but they won’t be able to see that it’s BitTorrent traffic, and thus won’t throttle your connection. You still have to be careful of going over your ISP’s bandwidth cap, however, if that exists.

BTGuard offers you both a proxy (to combat spying) and encryption (to combat throttling)—though many torrent clients have encryption built-in as well.

Sounds great, right? Now the caveats: First, BTGuard isn’t free. At $7/month (as little as $5 if you pay for a year in advance), it isn’t very expensive, and we think it’s well worth it if you want to torrent anonymously. A law suit settlement, if it comes to that, will cost you at least a couple thousand dollars, which equals a couple decades of BTGuard subscriptions, so keep that in mind, too. The other potential downside is that piping your downloads through another service may decrease your upload and download speeds. How much depends on what torrent you’re downloading, who from, and a lot of other factors, but just know that it’s a possibility. In my experience, more popular torrents stayed at their top speed of 1.4 MB/s (my bandwidth cap) with a proxy, while other less popular torrents (which flew at 1.4MB/s without a proxy) would fluctuate around 200 or 300 kB/s with BTGuard in place. Again, though, a little longer wait on downloads is well worth the protection you get.

Lastly, proxies aren’t supported by every client, which means you’ll have to use one with more advanced features. uTorrent (for Windows) and Vuze (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) both support proxies, but sadly Mac and Linux favorite Transmission does not. (If you’re absolutely stuck with a client that doesn’t support proxies, check the end of this article for some alternative solutions to the anonymity problem.)

How to Set Up BTGuard

BTGuard has a one-click install process, but we’re going to show you how to do it the manual way, since it works in any BitTorrent client that supports SOCKS5 Proxy—not just the ones supported by BTGuard’s installer. It’ll also give you a better sense of what exactly BTGuard does, so if you run into problems, you’ll have a better idea of how to fix it.

Step One: Sign Up for BTGuard

First, sign up for an account over at BTGuard.com. It’ll just take a minute, and then you can get to configuring your client. Their BitTorrent proxy service costs $6.95 a month, but you can get discounts by buying multiple months at a time (up to a year’s service for $59.95). Once you’re done, you should receive an email telling you that BTGuard is ready to go.

Step Two: Configure Your Client

Next, open up your torrent client of choice and find the proxy settings within its preferences. In uTorrent, for example, this is under Preferences > Connection. Your client may have them in a different place (Google around to find out where), but no matter your client, your settings should look like this:

• Proxy Type: Socks v5
• Proxy Host: proxy.btguard.com
• Proxy Port: 1025
• Username: Your BTGuard username
• Password: Your BTGuard password

You’ll also want to make sure you’re using the proxy for hostname or tracker lookups as well as peer-to-peer connections, so check all boxes that say anything like that. You’ll also want to disable connections or features that could compromise the proxy, so check all the boxes under uTorrent’s “Proxy Privacy” section, or anything similar that your client may have. Hit Apply, exit the preferences, and restart your client. Your proxy should now be active.

Step Three: See If It’s Working

To ensure that it’s working, head over to CheckMyTorrentIP.com. This site can tell you what your IP address is, and compare it to the IP address of your torrent client, which will let you know whether your proxy is working correctly. To test it, hit the “Generate Torrent” button, and open the resulting torrent in your client. Then, go back to your browser and hit the Refresh button under the “Check IP” tab. If it’s the same as your browser IP—which you’ll see next to the Refresh button—then your proxy isn’t working, and you’ll want to double-check all of the above settings. If it shows a different IP address (often from another country like Germany or Canada), then BTGuard is successfully tunneling all your traffic for you.

Step Four (Optional): Enable Encryption

If you want extra security (or if you’re trying to protect your connection from being throttled), you’ll also want to encrypt all that traffic. Many clients have this feature built-in. In uTorrent, for example, just head to Preferences > BitTorrent and look for the “Protocol Encryption” section. Change your outgoing connection to Forced encryption, and uncheck the “Allow incoming legacy connections” box. From there, you should be good—your ISP shouldn’t throttle your connection after this is enabled.

If your client doesn’t support encryption, or you want a more powerful encryption behind your torrenting, BTGuard offers an encryption service as well. Just head to their Encryption page, download the software, and install it to C:\BTGUARD (this is very important; don’t change the installation directory). Then, start the BTGuard Encryption program (accessible from the Start menu), and open up your BitTorrent client. Change your proxy server from proxy.btguard.com to 127.0.0.1, restart your client, and you’re golden. Again, this isn’t necessary if your client already supports encryption, but it is an extra layer of protection if you really want to keep everything private.

Other Alternatives

Lastly, while this is our preferred BitTorrent privacy solution, it won’t work for everyone. For example, if you’re stuck with a specific client that doesn’t support proxies, you’ll need something different. Here are a few of your other options:

A full VPN: If your client doesn’t support proxies, you’ll want a full VPN service that anonymizes all your traffic, not just BitTorrent. You can use one of these great VPN services to protect your traffic, but it’s likely you could still experience speed decreases—though this time, they’ll affect all your browsing. If you only use it when torrenting, that’s fine, but this isn’t good for those that want to seed those torrents afterwards. You should also make sure that the VPN service you choose doesn’t keep logs of your activity, because if they do, that defeats the purpose of using them at all.

A Seedbox: If you want to contribute back to the community (or if you’re on a private tracker that requires you seed to a certain ratio), you’ll want to try a seedbox. A seedbox is essentially a dedicated server in another country that does all the torrenting for you, using their very high speed connection. Once a torrent is downloaded, you can then connect to your seedbox via FTP or something similar and download your files from them that way. It’s more expensive than a simple proxy (ranging from entry-level boxes at $10 or $20 a month to fast boxes with more storage at $50 or even $100 a month), but it allows you to keep seeding at very high speeds. There are a lot of good seedbox providers. Bytesized and ExtremeSeed come highly recommended, but a bit of searching can probably find you a lot of different options. Shop around and see which one’s best for you.

Usenet: Your last alternative is totry a new filesharing service entirely, like Usenet. It offers encrypted connections and doesn’t connect to peers, so others can’t track what you’re doing. It doesn’t always have the selection that BitTorrent has (depending on what you’re downloading), but it offers a ton of other advantages, most notably higher speeds and more privacy. Check out our guide to getting started with Usenet to see if it’s right for you.

BitTorrent isn’t the safe place it once was, and if you’re going to use it to share and download files, we highly recommend getting some sort of protection from the services above so you can avoid DCMA notices and throttled speeds.Got any other tips for keeping your file sharing on the down low? Share them with us in the comments.

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

Finally this is available in dev, which means the iPhone 4s/iPad2 public release will soon follow.  Check it out geeks!

Ref: http://www.redmondpie.com/jailbreak-ipad-2-5.0.1-ios-untethered-video-demo/

iPad 2 Jailbreak On iOS 5.x Demoed On Video

The iPad 2, which was released earlier this year, is, from what I can tell, one of the slowest iOS devices to get a jailbreak. So far, it has only been jailbroken on iOS 4.3.3 and there has been no news of an iOS 5 jailbreak… until today, that is. An iPhone Dev-Team member has confirmed that the iPad 2 has been jailbroken on iOS 5 and we’ve got the details after the jump!

The news comes directly from MuscleNerd – famous iPhone hacker and member of the iPhone Dev-Team – in the form of a tweet in which he shares a video of an iPad 2 jailbroken on iOS 5.

From Twitter:

Here’s a short video of current JB working on iPad2: youtu.be/oJVGl1eRW2A (Just like iPhone4S, lots of hurdles remain, no ETAs)

(For completeness (& post-verification this is real), here’s the iPad2 iOS5 ioreg dump musclenerd.com/ioreg_ipad2.txt .. 4S is earlier in timeline)

The video MuscleNerd uploaded shows an iOS device launching Photo Booth, which firstly confirms that the iOS device in question is, in fact, an iPad 2. He then launches Newsstand, which confirms that the iPad 2 is on iOS 5, and, finally launching Cydia which, well, confirms that the iPad 2 running iOS 5 is jailbroken! We’ve embedded the video at the end of this post.

For the sake of “completeness” and “post-verification”, MuscleNerd has included iPad 2 on iOS 5’s ioreg dump which you can find here. I personally don’t understand one word of the .txt file, but if you know your stuff, you can find proof of MuscleNerd’s “iOS 5 iPad 2 jailbroken” claims inside it.

It is not clear what exploit is being used to jailbreak the iPad 2, but there is a possibility that it might be like one of those five userland exploits which were announced at MyGreatFest 2011.

As we mentioned in the very beginning of this post, the iPad 2 can only be jailbroken on iOS 4.3.3. If you haven’t upgraded to iOS 5, you can follow our guide on how to jailbreak iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3.

No Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) has been given by MuscleNerd, so please be patient and try not to bug the Dev Team about it. The jailbreak will come when it is ready!

A lot of people have asked me how they can “Hotspot” their machine on the fly.  Here is a neat article I found that may help some of you.

Ref: http://www.winsupersite.com/article/faqtip/windows-7-tip-of-the-week-use-wireless-hosted-networking-to-share-an-internet-connection-wirelessly

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Windows 7 Tip of the Week: Use Wireless Hosted Networking to Share An Internet Connection Wirelessly

• reprints
• Email
• Print

rating: (3)

So I was “stumble!”ing around and came across this post.: 

Increase Alexa traffic ranking by 5 million points in 10 days – Just Stumble!

Source Link: http://www.terencechang.com/2007/06/11/increase-alexa-traffic-ranking-by-5-million-points-in-10-days-just-stumble/

Is it possible to increase Alexa traffic ranking by 5 million points in 10 days? Yes. I did. What does that mean to me? Why I still think that Alexa traffic ranking won’t do any good to my site. Is Alexa traffic ranking too easy to be manipulated? Would you get more benefit from it, if you have high Alexa traffic ranking? Does it drive more traffic to your web site?

For the past 10 days, I was optimizing my WordPress blog to get a better page ranking for the future. I just realized that my Alexa traffic ranking jump up for about 5 million points in 10 days since June 1st, 2007. On June 1st, 2007, my Alexa traffic ranking was 5,857920. On June 2nd, 2007, I post a new blog entry Increase page ranking with diy marketing strategies. On June 8th, 2007, I check my Alexa traffic ranking and my page ranking went up 3 million spots to 2,215,547. Yesterday, I checked my Alexa page ranking again and found it jump up to 1,777,106.

So what have been done to my blog to get this dramatic results? I have seen people post on their blog saying their Alexa traffic page ranking jump from one million to 300K in three weeks. That is a lot longer than my records. So I went back to find out what I have done and what have had happened in the past few days.

June 1st, 2007.

June 8th, 2007.

June 11th, 2007.

I have thought about what changes I have made to make this happen. First of all, my WordPress blog was not optimized. Not even now. I have a lot to do to make this blog work for the best. So there is not much to do on my blog to help my Alexa traffic page ranking to boost. So what else?

I signed MyBlogLog.com on June 1st, 2007. I also signed up BlogCatalog.com, Bumpzee.com and StumbleUpon.com. All of them are sort of social networking for blogger. Since the date I signed up BlogCatalog.com and Bumpzee.com, I don’t have many activities and don’t have any friends on my list. I spent most of time on MyBlogLog.com and StumbleUpon.com to add friends and join communities. I followed some of the blogger’s suggestion to add Alexa redirect link to my profile on MyBlogLog.com. So whenever visitors click on my page it will redirect to my terencechang.com page through Alexa redirect URL. However, I check my hit counter history for the past few days and decide to remove the redirect URL, since there is less than 1% of my traffic from MyBlogLog.com. People check out my profile, but they don’t click on my links. I, somehow, guess that people will be hesitate to click on links says Alexa Redirect. Would you click if you know there is a redirect URL?

So I have eliminate 90% of facts that might generate such traffic to increase my Alexa traffic page ranking. The only thing left for me to think about is StumbleUpon.com. So I dig into my hit counter history. I found more than 50% of my traffic in the last 10 days are from StumbleUpon.com. Well. after I post the Increase page ranking with diy marketing strategies, I stumble my own page and made a review. I tag the post to Business/marketing communities. I don’t know if this matters. I see traffic coming in an hours after my post is live.

So for the past 10 days, I got tremendous traffic to my web site from StumbleUpon and 90% of those traffic goes directly into my DIY marketing strategies post, but not to my home page. I figure Alexa update the traffic statistic every 3-4 days. So in the next few days, I should see my traffic page ranking moving up again.

So why I still don’t think Alexa traffic ranking will do anything good to my blog? I agree with few of the bloggers out there. Why Alexa sucks.
3 Reasons Why Alexa Sucks (And They Know It!)

1. I don’t run advertisement on my blog. High Alexa traffic ranking won’t help me to get revenue through ad.
2. I don’t rely on Alexa to drive traffic into my blog.
3. It seems too easy to manipulate Alexa traffic ranking with embedded Alexa redirect.
4. More people are hating Alexa redirect and refuse to click on redirect link.

At this moment, high Alexa traffic ranking means nothing to me. I, however, am surprised by the funny facts that Alexa traffic ranking drives many people nut. After reading Be A Good Stumbler post, I believe I just did one magic step to register my post to StumbleUpon.com, but I also believe that it’s enough for now. No more post my own post to StumbleUpon.com. It might give people impression as spam.

After all, I do believe that StumbUpon drive huge traffic to web site, if you can be a good friends to many people and provide good quality content. People will come to your web site. Page ranking, search engine result won’t mean anything if you can just get traffic from nowhere. So be smart and be positive to put up more quality content. That’s right. That is my next goal.

I’ve removed the pictures our to save reading time/visual space. Visit the author’s link if you want to see more.

I’m going to try to trick the Alexa ranking system and try to think up an algorithm on how to scale ranks. I firmly believe that people care too much about their “Status” and less about their target/seo markets. Food for thought but I have some evil ideas from this.

Check out http://yitw.net for some cool tools. We have a URL shortener, Pastebin, and image gallery hosting service available for you all to use! Don’t forget to post in our forums on http://youritwizard.com if you have questions or comments!

Happy Thanksgiving from YourITwizard.com to all of you!

I’ve finished messing with the forums and started posting the live pages of the site. Thanks for dealing with the temp setup!