Boost internet speed for free with UK VPN

For all wired and wireless users who are experiencing fluctuating internet speed at daytime or other peak hours, now you can use a high speed free VPN situated in the UK.

Just log on to http://uk.newfreevpn.com/ and follow the steps to setup the VPN for your respective operating system.
Authentication Details:
PPTP Server: ukvpn.newfreevpn.com
PPTP Username: free
PPTP Password: 1234 

Whats more, it works in Windows and Android both and its ad free!!!
Also, you will also get additional encryption security via the VPN which can prevent anybody from sniffing your confidential information over an unsecured line. Especially applicable when surfing over public WiFi environment.

I have personally tested it with YouTube and Dailymotion. Both are working like a charm.
You can also unlock UK specific web resources like BBC iPlayer, etc.

For a great tutorial on how to set up a VPN in Windows 7 follow this link:
https://www.ipredator.se/guide/pptp/windows7

Another high speed VPN server details are at http://www.freevpnservers.com/free-vpn-account/.
It plays YouTube videos like a charm.

Also try these newer sites-
http://www.justfreevpn.com/

Server:  uk.justfreevpn.com
PPTP Username:  justfreevpn
PPTP Password:  <check site>


http://www.securitykiss.com offers a limited data VPN service with a transfer limit of 300 MB per day.
It offers great speed due to its fair usage policy and fully supports both desktop and mobile platforms.
You just need to create your own free account to get your VPN credentials. It supports L2TP/IPSEC technology too which offers greater security than PPTP VPN.

Five moves that BSNL can take to improve broadband speed

BSNL is mostly famous for its wide reach, lower tariff and good network up time.

But many people, like me, do not get their maximum subscribed internet speed during peak hours. This is mainly due to overloaded backbone network of BSNL. The edge routers which make the transition to a foreign network like TATA, Reliance, Level 3  etc. are overloaded and hence the users get lesser speed during peak hours.

This may be minimized by doing some improvements.
1.) BSNL must improve its backbone network utilization by moving all the bandwidth intensive activities inside its own network. There is a lot of redundant bandwidth inside the network due to presence of optical fibers, but sadly it cannot be used much because major servers like YouTube caching servers lie outside the network.
All the other network biggies like VSNL, Reliance Comm, Airtel and even Spectranet have their own dedicated YouTube caching servers. But BSNL still relies on VSNL server for streaming YouTube videos. If BSNL had its own dedicated server inside its own network then a major data consumption problem would get solved then and there.
Thus, BSNL must setup its own YouTube caching server.

2.) Other thing is that it should also install a network looking glass within its network like Reliance, Tata, Airtel, etc. It would surely help in debugging network and routing problems remotely and customers can also get a proof of the state-of-the-art network of BSNL. End users can also use it to perform trace route from within BSNL network to their respective networks.

3.) Another thing is that the DNS mapping of BSNL servers is flawed. I am especially talking about mapping of domain names of some very popular CDNs like Akamai. Here what happens is that even though BSNL has an Akamai server within its own network (210.212.*.*), its DNS servers tend to resolve domains like "cdn.blinkx.com" to IP addresses belonging to VSNL, NTT America, etc. This finally results in wastage of international bandwidth because the content will then be fetched from far off networks when it actually lies within the ISP's own network.
What's the use of a CDN if you still want to download from remote servers?

4.) BSNL should try to enhance the cluster router capacity that facilitates connection with international networks like Tinet, Level 3, CWW, etc. If possible provide more number of edge routers and that too spread them evenly across the globe. At present all the routers connecting to Tinet, Level 3 and CWW are situated in the US. So if packets have to travel to UK then initially they must go via US!

5.) And finally, BSNL should also partner with other CDNs like Limelight Networks and EdgeCast.
Airtel already has partnered with these CDNs for getting better network performance.

The above points should be taken seriously if BSNL Broadband intends to stay in competition with Airtel, Tata, Reliance and even 3G, 4G service providers.

Simulate HTTP POST requests

Ever wondered how to simulate or create an HTTP GET/POST request without even writing a piece of HTML code yourself......
Now you can do so within your Chrome browser just by using an app called Postman REST client.
It is very user friendly and immensely powerful.
It has a lot of customization which is entirely GUI based and you can even view the reply from the server in various formats.
You can also save lengthy requests along with their cookie values for future use so that the next time you just have to send it and view the reply directly.

I used it to simulate the HTTP POST transactions to Groove shark server and for viewing the JSON reply that it gave for my manually created search queries.
I was finally able to even download an mp3 without using their flash client but was not able to save it properly or even run it as it was displaying the mp3 file as text.

DMCA blogger content security registration

This is for frequent bloggers. Remember that the content you post is available publicly over the Internet.
So anybody can unethically copy your posts, perform some presentation related mods and then re post it in their own blogs.
That way your organic visitor count might get affected due to this unethical post copying and that too without disclosing the original source.
If you feel that you post a lot of original content which require you a lot of efforts and you really do not want others to just copy your content online and paste it in their respective blogs then the following link is for you

http://www.exeideas.com/2012/08/secure-your-blog-website-from-content-copier-thefter.html

Basically you can register your blog in the DMCA database and provide your blog with text and image copyright protection. So any illegal copiers will get DMCA take down notice.
For that you may use DMCA tags on your blog along with subscribing to their paid service for a nominal fee per month.

Comparing websites and search queries --- Google trends and Alexa ranking

Ever wondered how you may compare two different websites and know which is the more popular one????

The answer to this is checking their corresponding Alexa ranking.....

Alexa is a company which collects stats about webpages and provides a rank to each of them based on their popularity, credibility and other factors.
Check http://alexa.com

Example:
1.) Suppose there are two sites http://careercup.com and the other is http://indiabix.com.
Now both are into helping people know how to crack aptitude tests and technical interviews.
So, how do we know which is the better one?
Rather than asking your friends you may also use website stats for a change.
Log on to Alexa or just search "<website-name> alexa" on Google. You will directly receive the corresponding website rankings.
Now just check which one's ranked higher in the world/U.S. to get a pretty fair idea.

Google trends:
Using this great data mining tool from Google you can easily compare different search keywords at one go.

Example:
1.) I have taken three lesser known software companies i.e. TIBCO, IVP and MAQSoftware and compared them simultaneously. You can see that TIBCO emerged as a clear winner and some further observation reveals that MAQ may be catching up with IVP in popularity over the years.
Notice an important feature that Google displays historic data or timeline view which helps in knowing how an entity changes with time.
You can also compare timelines of different websites using this tool by switching to the websites tab.
It also tells about the nation wise keyword search distribution.
There is also an "Export to CSV option" if you like.

Download YouTube videos and other flash videos without using java plugin, other software or other web service

Now with Google Chrome browser downloading flash videos is a cake walk. You don't need any other software to get the video URL from cache. Only thing needed further is your bandwidth to download the video.

Steps:
1. Open the desired streaming video for ex. YouTube and just start streaming the video.

2. Now you may close this window or just open the below link in new tab ---
                         chrome://cache

3. Search in the list for your desired video URL. You may need some practice in finding out multimedia URLs. Find sub strings like "videoplayback?" for YouTube URLs. For other websites you may try to find extensions like ".flv", ".mp4", etc.

Sample URL:


http://o-o---preferred---bom04s03---v20---lscache1.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?algorithm=throttle-factor&burst=40&cp=U0hTSFlOUl9JUUNOM19RSFZHOlRjc1IzSnhMTnFE&expire=1343934647&factor=1.25&fexp=920912%2C914076%2C910100%2C913602%2C915507%2C907217%2C919804%2C920704%2C912806%2C924500%2C924700%2C913547%2C904721%2C920706%2C907344%2C912706%2C900816%2C902518%2C909414&id=63b1beb58473c186&ip=117.217.5.178&ipbits=8&itag=34&keepalive=yes&key=yt1&ms=au&mt=1343911519&mv=m&signature=963E8654499228D382D491E65FE0CA25D042C5BA.55F7D4E540F8E6E9081E72CAAABF433E936754B3&source=youtube&sparams=algorithm%2Cburst%2Ccp%2Cfactor%2Cid%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&sver=3&upn=WZYm_t2__xM&title=desi_boyz

4. After finding YouTube URL, copy the link in notepad and just do two necessary modifications ---
    a.) Remove the sub string "&range=13-xxxxx" from the URL.
    b.) Append the sub string "&title=<your-file-name>" to the end of the URL.

5. Now copy the new URL and open in browser to start video download with desired name                        "<your-file-name>.flv".

6. If you are downloading from other sites like daily motion, Metacafe, Vimeo, video bash, etc. then directly open the cached URL from step 3. Use "save link as" option if necessary.

Google Chrome net-internals, CDN hack using DNS overriding

Ever wondered how to check the URL through which videos are being streamed via flash objects or the URL through which your file is getting downloaded......Well it's easy with Google Chrome Browser.

Just go to the link chrome://net-internals/#sockets while the video is playing in the background and further click on "Flush socket pools" or "Close idle sockets" to get the exact URL you require.
See screenshot for YouTube server.

Now you may use this technique to edit your CDN server for better download speeds. A CDN is a content delivery server which delivers videos from sites like http://metacafe.com via a delivery partner like Akamai. The only interesting part is that the actual server is mostly located somewhere nearest to the user, possibly on his own network. Thus, he may get very high speeds without much contention.

But in some cases the DNS servers are not very effective in resolving the CDN host name to the best possible IP. Consider the case of metacafe on BSNL net connection. The site has a streaming URL of http://v.mccont.com which is actually supported by Akamai CDN.

But due to poor DNS management by BSNL the host name v.mccont.com resolves to an ip address of VSNL network instead of BSNL's own network. So sometimes I don't get the desired speeds due to contention.

Thus, we can bypass this drawback by using static DNS mappings for  hostnames like v.mccont.com.
Follow below steps to implement static DNS mapping in Windows.
1. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ and locate the hosts file. Cut and Copy it to desktop and open it with notepad.
2. Add the following entries to the hosts file. General format is <ip> <domain>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

218.248.44.170 v.mccont.com
218.248.44.170 cdn.blinkx.com
218.248.44.170 av.vimeo.com
#210.212.11.18 cdn.blinkx.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3. Now save it and again cut and copy it back to its original location.

The mapped ip addresses belong to BSNL's own network so negligible contention is expected.
# means that the line is commented or inactive.

cdn.blinkx.com belongs to http://blinkx.com and av.vimeo.com belongs to http://vimeo.com.
All are supported by Akamai CDN network.