Tag: search

  • [How To] find out which program is using your webcam to spy on you

    If you are worried that someone might be spying on you using your webcam, then MakeUseOf has a list of steps you can follow to find out which program you have on your system that carries a spyware or malware, capable of triggering your webcam to spy on you.

    This is a little “Do it yourself” method, but it ensures the spot on result. You’ll have to find the compromised software on your own. To do this, you’ll need Process Explorer, the awesome Windows Sysinternals tool developed by Microsoft for IT work. You can download the installer here if you like, or you can just run the application from their server.

    With Process Explorer running, follow these steps:

    • Figure out what your camera’s object name is by finding it in Device Manager. For Windows 7: search “Device Manager” in the start menu. For Windows 8.1: search the same thing in the Charms bar.
    • Once you locate it in the Device Manager, double-click and go to the “Details” tab. Open the property drop-down and select “Physical device object name”, then right-click to copy the name.
    • Return to the Process Explorer, or get it started if you haven’t yet. Then hit Ctrl+F and paste the camera’s object name into the search field and click “Search.” You should see whatever processes are currently using your webcam.

    If you recognize the program which are using your webcam, like skype, hangout, webcam snap tool etc. then there’s no need to worry! If you don’t recognize the program, right-click it in Process Explorer and select “Kill Process“, then uninstall it from your machine. After the program has been removed, run a full-system virus scan to ensure your machine is safe to use again.

  • New search engine lists all illegal underground websites you can never reach out before!

    New search engine lists all illegal underground websites you can never reach out before!

    Update: Grams search engine was shutdown on December 2017.

    If you have been searching for the underground websites in the cyberworld which offers “All things illegal” then a new Google-like search engine “Grams” can end your quest. Hidden websites running under Onion Network, has been a new way to buy illegal stuff anonymously.

    Underground websites offer illegal high-quality drugs or rifles, hacking tools, or any illegal services, until now you needed to type long, complex and specific Tor Browser URLs directly into the browser which is quite difficult to remember. Grams, can really save all the trouble and additionally allows you to find more sources matching your quest.

    It is as simple as you might think – you can search for the keywords and the Google-like search engine will return the results matching your queries, listing all the sellers on Onion Network.

    I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like google’s it will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up, how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see the best listing first,” Grams’ creator who calls himself Gramsadmin wrote on Reddit. He also added, “I am going to add a filter market this week so a user can search only the markets they have accounts for.

  • Feedly launches new premium service – Feedly Pro

    Feedly launches new premium service – Feedly Pro

    Feedly released the much anticipated feature for the millions of existing users and new one, which allows them to have some exclusive features. Feedly has been hinting about the paid option even since Google announced the shut down, and it might be the best time to do that — considering the ever growing active users on the website.

    Feedly Pro is a &5 a month service that offers features which the more intense news junkies will appreciate, including priority for tech support, better security and search. For those who trust feedly service can have the lifetime access to the Feedly Pro services by paying a one time fees $99.00.digitfreak 201300000509 lifetime

    Right now Feedly Pro has more than enough to tempt me to sign up:

    • Article search: Search within your feedly feeds.
    • Evernote: One-click save to any of your Evernote notebooks.
    • Premium Support: Get bumped to the front of the support line.
    • https: Add a layer of security to your feedly browsing.digitfreak 201300000511 features

    The first bullet point steals the show, which is really useful since Facebook shut their doors for the tech enthusiast. Searching the right content within the list of your rss list has been my favorite option provided by Google reader.

    Feedly has promised to improve the premium service over time. Based on their history, feedly has been very reliable company when it comes to providing a reliable service.

    Are you going to opt for the premium service? Let us know in comments!

    [Source: Feedly Pro]

  • Recent NSA scandal encourages anonymous search engine duckduckgo with a traffic boom!

    Recent NSA scandal encourages anonymous search engine duckduckgo with a traffic boom!

    Remember only few weeks back there was a whole fuss going on online about the NSA’s secret operation named PRISM that collects sensitive data from search engines and social networks like Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. Well just a few weels after that a simple search engine named duckduckgo.com came under the spotlight.

    veiws
    The matter started when Guarding wrote about this seach engine owned by Gabriel Weinberg which vows that it does not collect any type of user data unlike Google and other search engines who constantly store everything related to a user through cookies and cache. Well it was just a start, and only few hours later he started noticing spikes in the number of visitors on his site.  According to him the web traffic has increased by almost 50% of its normal status. And Guess what it looks like it ain’t gonna stop since more and more revelations about the NSA and PRISM are coming into the light.

    According to weinberg “It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism. We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press. From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight. ” say he who is currently living in paoli, Philadelphia.

    duckduckgo
    Before this incident almost nobody must have ever heard of this Search engine as it is not famous at all or comes under the alternative option in the browsers on desktop or mobiles.  Different from the common day search engine, this one does not work on any cookie or cache so there is no personal data stored about any user and there is nothing there to give to the Goovernment.

    duckgoodies
    Weinberg says that someday he got the idea that he could actually build up something that will be secure, anonymous and efficient unlike Google which is currently showing make trash links just because many webmasters have cracked the search engine’s algorithm. He hooked up with web services like wikipedia, Yelp etc to create something that was accurate and focused.

    In the matter of public privacy in the case of search strings, he says: “I kind of backed into that.” It wasn’t a political decision, but a personal one. “It’s hard to define my politics. I take every issue seriously and come to my own conclusion. I don’t really feel like I belong to any political party in the US … I guess I’m more on the liberal side.”

    For the company storing anyone’s data and search history is like hacking into other’s lives and thats bad. They reveal so much about anyone, that if one could know how much Google knows about a person then he might even change his total identity! Whatever be the future, we can now know for sure that there are some who are not selling our privacy just for some ads and revenues.duckduckgo-billboard-closeup

    Digitfreak is with duckduckgo.com, where are you?

  • [How To] Delete your Facebook search history

    [How To] Delete your Facebook search history

    You have a huge crush on one of your friend’s ex-girlfriend and you used to visit her profile so often. You might think that nobody else knows your little secret – other than yourself.

    There are lots of similar events you might have searched for – on Facebook which could be little embarrassing if you lookout for it now. You might even don’t remember what you searched in the past.

    But, Facebook does…!

    Facebook stores every single keyword you searched for in their database. Although, the privacy setting of this section is set to only you, but it might be little kinky to see all your searches stored at one place – even the embarrassing ones.

    Here’s a quick step to delete your Facebook search history:

     

    Instructions:

    facebook profileStep 1 – Go to your profile and click on “Activity Log” on the lower left corner of your cover photo.

     

    activity logStep 2 – Click on “more” on the left side of the activity log to reveal the options related to your account. You have to focus on the third column – See Image.

     

    click on searchStep 3 – Scroll down the expanded list and you will see “search” as the last option. Click on it.

     

    clear searchesStep 4 – You can now view your Facebook search history, in date order. To get rid of it, simply click “Clear Searches”

     

    pop up messageStep 5 – A new pop-up message will apear. Click on “Clear Searches” again – and you are done.

  • Tribler, a new method to keep bitTorrent alive forever

    Tribler, a new method to keep bitTorrent alive forever

    BitTorrent or P2P protocols are the best means to transfer large files over the distance, without contributing much load on any centralized environment. Millions of People use p2p protocols to transmit files of their needs.

    BitTorrent is branded as a peer-to-peer technology, but despite this label the downloading process still relies heavily on central servers. In the first place, there are the BitTorrent search engines and indexes such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. These are needed to search for content and to grab the .torrent file one needs to download a file.

    Besides these torrent sites, most BitTorrent downloads are still managed by so-called trackers. These servers coordinate the download process and make sure that people can find others who are sharing the files they want to download. To a certain degree, trackers are no longer needed with ‘trackerless’ technology such as DHT, but even DHT often uses a central server to get a torrent started.

    Finally, central servers are used by moderators to help hunt spam and malware. All file sharing programs without such central checking have become practically useless over time.

    In the last year these ‘central server’ vulnerabilities have caused a number of minor inconveniences for torrent users. When trackers go offline, downloads usually slow down or may stop entirely, and when a torrent search engine such as The Pirate Bay has technical issues, users have to search for alternatives.

    While the file-sharing ecosystem is currently filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology continue to work on their decentralized BitTorrent network. Their Tribler client doesn’t require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication.

    “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” the lead researcher says.

    Introduction

    2-tribler-introductionTribler is an open source peer-to-peer client with various features for watching videos online. The user interface of Tribler is very basic and focused on ease of use, instead of including features. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content. Tribler features include: video-only searching, experimental video streaming, and an integrated video player. Tribler is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
    The name Tribler stems from the word Tribe, referring to the usage of social networks in this P2P client. The first version of Tribler was a small enhancement on the ABC (Yet Another BitTorrent Client)

    Features
    Tribler adds keyword search ability to the BitTorrent file download protocol using a gossip protocol, somewhat similar to the eXeem network which was shut down in 2005. The software includes the ability to recommend content. After a dozen downloads the Tribler software can roughly estimate the download taste of the user and recommends content. This feature is based on collaborative filtering, also featured on websites such as Last.fm and Amazon.com. Another feature of Tribler is a limited form of social networking and donation of upload capacity. Tribler includes the ability to mark specific users as online friends. Such friends can be used to increase the download speed of files by using their upload capacity. Due to these features Tribler differs from other popular BitTorrent clients such as Vuze and µTorrent.

    The tribler offers some basic and advanced features which you can’t find on your current torrent client. Ofcourse it could be the future file transfer protocol adopted by the current p2p users. 

    Settings window

    3-tribler-settingsThe “settings” windows offers very basic and useful option which could be helpful while using the client. It is the place where you can add your user profile and enjoy online identity.

    Search listing & downloads

    4-tribler-search-listingTribler offers search listing of your queries which works on different mechanism of other torrent websites. It doesn’t relies on the centralized server to perform its queries, rather it can retrieve the data and .torrent files from other peers connected to your client. To get the most relevant and most relevant result you must keep your client running for at least 5 minutes before performing the search query, as the client connects to other peers and maintains an index while it is running, which can further help you get the most relevant search results of your desired destination.

    5-tribler-mrta-informationThe download process if very easy and is performed on the fly, downloading a torrent file was never so easy. You just need to click on the name of the file you want to download in your search results and information related to the file will slide in right below the name, where you can find all the relevant information about the file right inside your client. You’ll find download button after each filename, clicking on which download starts automatically and tribler will download .torrent meta file from other peer on the network and start your download.

    Channels

    6-tribler-channelsThis is the features, which makes me happy. It is not much of the useful thing atm, but soon, when other users will start listing the torrent files which they find useful for them on their own profile, it will be the best thing on the client or any other p2p software out there. 

    Users can list down the torrents they like or think they should recommend to others to their channels and people on the network using tribler can view or download the files from it. 

    For example you can look for eztv channel and can crawl to the torrents listed by them at one place. just go to the channel and click on the download button right beside the torrent name you can want to download.

    SwarmPlayer
    The SwarmPlayer is a Python based BitTorrent Internet TV viewer. It allows you to watch BitTorrent-hosted peer-to-peer digital media distribution of video on-demand and plays live Tribler streaming media. It is based on the same core as the Tribler TV application.
    The core software is free and open-source software based on the Tribler platform, licensed under the LGPL 2.1.

    Development
    Tribler was created by university researchers trying to improve peer-to-peer technology. Tribler is designed to enhance BitTorrent by removing the need for central elements such as the websites for finding content. The aim is to increase performance, reliability, and scalability.

    The Tribler BitTorrent client is no newcomer to the BitTorrent scene. It has been in development for more than 5 years and has delivered many innovative features, which have mostly been ignored by the masses.

    What is it all about?
    Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

    Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

    “Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

    “We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

    So how does it work?

    8-your-centralised-informationLike many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

    Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

    The same is true for spam control. Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user-generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

    The latest addition to Tribler is a Wikipedia-style editing system dubbed “Open2Edit,” where users have the option to edit names and descriptions of torrents in public channels. All without a central server, totally decentralized.

    According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shut down, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

    One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so-called bootstrap Tribler peers. These users will act as super peers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

    “Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

    While the Tribler client only has a few thousand users at the moment, for avid file-sharers it must be a relief to know that it’s out there. No matter what crazy laws may pass in the future, people will always be able to share.

    Those who want to give it a spin are welcome download Tribler here. It’s completely Open Source and with a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.


     

    tribler update

    Update: After an article on TorrentFreak and DigitFreak in February 2012 mentioned Tribler’s decentralization and the fact that its index is impossible to take down, the website became hugely popular, causing it to be reduced to just the download page to comply with demand.


    Download: Tibler for cross OS


    Source: TorrentFreak, Havard Internet TV, Wikipedia, other sources.