Archive for February, 2008

Since the beginning, the Xbox 360 has been an extremely unreliable. Some reports indicate that up to 16.4% of them fail, while its competitors the PS3, and Wii are at 3%. Up to 60% of these failures were caused by the red ring of death. Team Xecuter has now come up with a repair kit which will fix the red ring of death. So far it’s been tested and is still working on 18 consoles, both new and old.

The fix isn’t the best solution as it requires you to open up your Xbox console to install it. It comes with the needed T10 and T8 screw drivers and each kit will cost $12.95. Considering opening your console voids your warranty, I don’t think this solution is practical for the average user. However, if you’re a modder, or even out of your warranty then this is the perfect solution.

I myself am quite skeptical of this fix. For the price, what could be in the kit? Not many details are given about it. I’m guessing it will be similar to X Clamp; thermal paste and some cheap hardware.

It has been an awful long time since we have shown any activity in the scene and the break has been much needed after a solid 6 years working at the top level.

Maybe it’s a modders last ditch effort to get back in to the scene?

Edit, Team Xecuter has responded to some community concerns and changed the pricing as follows:

1 Kit $9.95 each
10 Kits $8.95 each
50 Kits $6.95 each
100 Kits $5.95 each

Also some points need addressing.

1. This is not any kind of X-Clamp or washers or screws or thermal paste or anything like that. It’s not rocket science and didn’t take months of development - more like 10 minutes

2. This is not sold as a permanent fix. You want that then get a new Xbox. All I know is that its simple, easy to do with little fuss and works on the boxes I’ve tested so far. It’s impossible to say how long it will last for - only people actually giving it a try will be able to answer that.

3. Yes you could probably make this kit yourself. All I have done is made the kit to an exact spec in an easy to use and cheap package.

Thanks to Cybernet

For months now Comcast has been under scrutiny on how they ran their network and treat their customers. From their P2P throttling, to the invisible bandwidth cut off mark, there have been thousands of dissatisfied customers. Comcast, now under pressure from the FCC is being a little more open about how their network works. They’ve also changed their terms of service to reflect their “new” policy.

Standard torrent traffic is upload and download, meaning a user both uploads and downloads the file at the same time. Since Comcast has as many as 500 house holds on one node, only a handful of users can greatly effect network speed. When seeding (allowing people to download files off of you), multiple individuals on one node can clog up the network for all other customers. Comcast has in return came up with an algorithm to determine if customers are “abusing” their bandwidth. If a user uploads a file for an unspecified amount of time without downloading they will issue reset packets. This will trick your client in to thinking the connection was lost and stops the upload.

Torrents are an extremely efficient way to move large amounts of data across computer networks. Many Linux distributions use torrents to release large pieces of software, sometimes gigabytes large. This takes quite a load off the server as the file is downloaded off many people rather than a single location. So why is Comcast against such a brilliant idea?

It looks like it’s time for Comcast to adapt or fail. With almost as many P2P users as TV show watchers, bandwidth usage won’t decrease anytime soon. Bandwidth hogging services such as Xbox Live and other consoles, VoIP, P2P, and the transfer of large high definition media aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

As a Comcast customer myself, I definitely feel the lag spikes they’re talking about. Usually occurring at peak time, web sites will load extremely slow - or not at all. I find what helps the most in these situations is steer clear of Comcast name servers, and opt for OpenDNS. However, penalizing paying customers for utilizing a service they pay for is wrong. Instead of blaming users, maybe Comcast needs to take a look at their network’s topology.

OpenDNS was founded in 2006 and ever since then I’ve been addicted to it. Each time I’m diagnosing network issues I manually add the magic numbers for DNS. The four simple numbers are 4.2.2.1; forever embedded in to my memory. So why do I use it you ask it? For a variety of reasons. Mainly for speed, but there are others…

Faster internet speed

I use Comcast as my ISP. While they do have decent bandwidth, their DNS queries are slow and unreliable. The ping time is quicker to the OpenDNS server than to the Comcast DNS server. However, this might not be true for you. The recommended name servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. I get faster results with the lesser known one.

Since OpenDNS is so large, it has the user base to cache millions upon millions of pages. This saves you an extra trip to a server to look up an IP. Their software relies on the webmaster to tell OpenDNS how long to cache their page using the Time to live setting.

Reliability

They have thousands of servers around the world ready to serve you. If anything goes wrong with one part of the network, a different part takes over. Using some of the most well known ISPs such as NTT, UUNET, and Cognet, there’s virtually 100% uptime. When I use my default nameservers, sometimes I’ll notice Firefox saying looking up google.com and delaying there for a bit. The page would then just load instantly. With OpenDNS both the query to look up Google

Phishing protection

Phishing is a common problem as the internet grows. Attackers will create domains that look similar to popular websites and then setup look alike sites to steal passwords. While the human eye might not recognize the slight differences in these phishing sites, OpenDNS has a blacklist of known phishing websites. It’ll compare the website you’re visiting to the black list and then prevent the websites content from being viewed.

Block adult sites

OpenDNS has an option to block websites deemed by St. Bernard to be indecent. St. Bernard is commonly accepted as a web filter at most schools and works; including mine. There is an option to add a custom logo for the blocked website to suite your company or family’s needs.

Track website statistics

With the statistics feature it makes it possible to track which websites you’ve been to and how many times. It’ll conviently place that on a graph or chart. A lot of people might find that to be a bad feature. However, that leads me to my next point…

OpenDNS data retention

Non customers like myself will have their IPs logged for 2 business days. Not bad considering other companies like Google will keep it for 18 months. A customer has an option not to log the data at all, as well as an option to just delete the data from their system completly. Neat huh?

In a world where the government can at any time subpoena search engine data it’s growing more important for companies to think of new ways to protect their users. Ask.com, which has a history of innovation has a neat function called AskEraser. Since the most widely used search engine is currently Google, it’s important for smaller search engines to offer such extra features. Ask has always been keeping us excited with features such as their thumbnail picture view and unique search results layout

It’s important to remember that all the big players retain your search data when you search through their site. Basic information such as user agent, IP, and search queries are saved. So which company is keeping your data the longest? Google holds on to theirs for 18 months, followed by Yahoo who retain it for 13 months. In fact Ask.com is the only major player that will allow you to control data retention. It should be noted that if the eraser is not used, the data will be retained for 18 months - matching Google.

As well as subpoena’s, your data can be compromised in a variety of ways. Many of the terms of service including Google’s tell you the data may be sold to third party companies. AOL learned it’s lesson after releasing the data of 600k users to the public. This so called “anonymized” data lead to the finding of multiple people who searched for very specific things.

It’s the only PDF file you’ll ever need to open, so why download Adobe’s PDF viewer? That’s the motto the folks at samurajdata had when creating their online PDF reader.

It’s as simple as it gets. Either enter in the web address of the PDF, or upload it to their servers from your computer. Their software will then present your document in a viewable form in your web browser. There are only a few options you have to manipulate the PDF, and those include zoom, tilt, and page next. I said it was simple right?

The best part about the whole thing is it’s free. Not only is it free, it’s open source. You can visit their main page for the latest version of their source code.

I downloaded the source code for it. It appears to be quite simple, utilizing linux shell scripts to decode the PDF. However, this presents a two downsides. One being the fact that it requires a linux server and the other being it requires a MySql database.

Overall it appears to be a highly useful script. If they actually do some of the things in their To Dos it will have a much greater value. Current it’s limited to only 256 colors, and the user interface is extremely basic. A great feature would include the ability to edit the PDFs and download the new version.