OneSwarm: Privacy preserving peer-to-peer

This is an interesting new technology for privacy preserved p2p sharing. It is being created at the University of Washington

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing. OneSwarm is:

• Privacy preserving: OneSwarm uses source address rewriting to protect user privacy. Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermedaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver. For more details, check out the OneSwarm overview screencast or our papers.
• User friendly: OneSwarm’s interface is web-based and supports real-time transcoding of many audio and video formats for in-browser playback, eliminating the need for casual users to master a new application’s interface or search for custom media codecs.
• Open: OneSwarm is freely available and built on existing standards. OneSwarm can operate as a fully backwards compatible BitTorrent client, and its friend-to-friend data sharing features are built on cryptographic standards, e.g., X.509 certificates and SSL encryption.

Download @:

www.oneswarm.com

Spotify Super Search ! – spotsearch.tk

Easy as spitting… Sorry, Spotting.

The advanced search tool Spotify Super Search has been updated to a finished version, adding some great new features such as a search history and smart genre filtering. The final features are:

• Create an advanced search query then click Search to search directly in Spotify!
• Select whether to search on Artist, Album, Track, or any field.
• Specify whether the result matches, starts with, or does not match your query.
• Search based on year (is, is before, is after, or is between)
• Filter the list of hundreds of genres as you type.
• Recall all previous searches using the new History feature.

Check it out:

I made a simple link to it so it’s easier to remember:

SPOTSEARCH.TK

more spotify tools on pansentient

Best Antivirus – Detection rates

A simple list of detection rates, from research by av-comparatives.org February 2009

Out of a total of 1.274.928 viruses, trojans, worms and malware the following list tells us the detection rates of the different AntiVirus programs:

1. G Data 99.8%

2. Avira 99.7%

3. McAfee2 99.1

4. Symantec 98.7%

5. Avast 98.2

6.  Bitdefender, eScan 98.0%

7. ESET Nod32 97.6%

8. Kaspersky, TrustPort 97.1%

9. F-Secure 93.4%

10. AVG 93&

11. Sophos 89.6%

12. Command 88.9%

13. Norman 87.8%

14. Microsoft 87.1%

15. Kingsoft 84.9%

I just found this interesting. More on av-comparatives.org

Microsoft shuts down Flight Simulator Studio

Microsoft has closed down one of their most profitable and oldest studios, the ACES studio that makes the Flight Simulator series. Rumors were confirmed yesterday.

“I can confirm the closure of Aces Studio,” a Microsoft representative told GameSpot.

As a Flight Simulator enthusiast myself i think it’s really sad to see ACES go. I’m still flying FS9 and FSX will be giving computers something to think about for some more years, but loosing all this talent must mean that there is an enormous task ahead to re-take the lost momentum in the development of this franchise, should they decide to continue it.

“You should expect us to continue to invest in enabling great Live experiences on Windows, including flying games, but we have nothing additional to announce around Flight Simulator specifically at this time.” the same source told Gamespot.

Well I guess we’ll just have to see, but it’s sad indeed….

Crysis: Enable Very High (DX10) Settings in XP, New updated hack

This hack should work for Crysis Warhead Enthusiast Settings, because it is using the same cryengine 2!

Enable the “Very High” quality setting in Crysis and Crysis Warhead on your dx9 or dx10 compatible hardware without having Vista and DX10 (DirectX 10)!

After building a new PC-rig, I had to try it out with the best PC game on the market today. At least as far as near photorealisticgraphics goes, Crysis. Under Windows XP (DirectX9) you can’t select the “Very High” settings in the graphics menu. These are reserved for Vista (DX10). However I don’t know if this is because of a Vista marketing thing, but the Very High quality can easily be achieved under Windows XP (DX9) , replacing a few textfiles in the Crysis Folder. (CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups)

This  has been known for quite some time. What it does isthat it changes crysis “High” settings to have “Very High” quality. The old version of the hack just changed this. This meant that there was no way of selecting the old “High” setting, because “High” was now “Very High” and the step below was Medium.

My version of the hack changes the “Medium” setting to high quality, and the “Low” setting to medium quality.

You are right, then there is no way of achieving low quality anymore. But if you are interested in “Very High” settings, youare probably not going to want to run that on a machine that only can display low settings…

Here is some further technical explanation:

I did a remake of the Cvar files. Instead of just copying the high settings to [3] I also renamed old [3] to [2], old [2] to [1] and removed old [1]

This way what used to be:

High is Very High
(This is all the candy!)

Medium is High
(What used to be our highest setting is now activated when we choose medium)

Low is Medium
(It doesnt go any lower since there are only 3 steps in XP i had to get rid of low settings alltogether)

Before with the old cVars “hack” if I chose to lower some settings, I actually had to go two steps to medium (from very high) now since meduim corresponds to high it’s only one step in that sense. There will of course be no Low settings, since they are now like the old medium, but I think anyone who uses thisk hack does not need to have anything set at low

Before we had 4 2 1 now we have 4 3 2 Which makes more sense.

Just like the original hack, I didn’t touch the MotionBlur file which is set to 1 (Very High Would be 3)

Results

It seems to work fine, these are screenshots taken at 1280*800 scaled to 50% and auto contrast corrected with Microsoft office image editor to sharpen them a bit.

This is Low (as standard Medium):

This is Medium (as standard High):

This is High (the tweaked mode Very High):

This means that if you install these cvars files, just go back to the menu and select “Medium” settings and everything will be just as it was previously on “High”, consequently setting something to “Low” will correspond to the old “Medium” setting.

I think you get the point

Here is the zip-file with the cvars

Unzip to the folder CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups

“CRYSIS” represents the install folder for crysis. It might vary. Thx Jonno.

If you think this was helpful, consider buying me a cup of coffee:

Disclaimer: I’ve had one report of losing savegames after changing the cvars files. This makes no sense at all, because the two things don’t have anything remotely to do with eachother. Sometimes updating the game with a PATCH might make you appear you lost your savegames, just see that you load the game with the same profile as before and your savegames will be back. However this hack only changes some graphics card settings and should in no way make you lose your savegames. But of course, you should use common sense when editing gamefiles. If you don’t know what you’re doing don’t mess with it, and buy a console 😉

If you want a free way to automatically backup your savegames try 2GB Free Online Backup – Mozy

Stage 6 Video renamer. Help!

I have a bunch of downloaded Stage6 Videos that I would like to keep. I normally use the auto download feature of Stage6. However these are named with just numbers.

I was thinking it should be possible for someone with basic coding skills to write a program that goes to the webpage for the video, using the video number code, extract the name information for that particular video from the html-code and rename the file. This would then be done as a batch for the entire folder.

I looked into parsing the html-file and that should not be a problem, but I have not got enough skill to program the whole thing. Should be rather easy I think. If anyone reads this, and has the necessary skills I think many people would enjoy such a program.

Strange to make a Blog-post about a request, but lots of people read these pages, so I’m hoping to get lucky 🙂 …ehm…