ONLINE STREAMING

If you are reading this post, you are most definitely experiencing a sigh of relief for I have been away and you thought am never coming back. Well I did some serious soul searching about what I really wanna do with this blog and my decision is I have to carry on.

That’s enough banter for somebody who has been away for so long. So today we will be talking about streaming online content. This again is not a definition class but a familiarization one. Streaming basically refers to the transmission of content over some media while the provider is providing (for lack of a better term) it. It so happens that the end-user can begin playing the data before the entire file has been received. The rationale here is that sometime slow internet connections for instance make 3 minutes audio file take 10 minutes to download.

The age old concept of buffering to make viable the playback of multimedia content while it’s still being downloaded is used. A buffer holds a reservoir of content sufficiently large to smooth out the bumps in playback that may be caused by momentary server sluggishness or network congestion.

Now here is the catch about streaming, it’s much more economical in terms of the load on the server. How is this so? This is because it sends out a single stream of data in which all the clients will be able to access. This is different from downloading because here there has to be a separate thread set up to service each request which is costly on the server performance.

Of course YouTube and MySpace lead the way together with the many radio and television channels now streaming live.

One of the Kenyan channels you can check out online and is reliable is:-

 http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/listenlive/

Then I stumbled upon this website. Don’t take my word for it go check it out.

http://www.surfmusic.de/country/kenya.html it claims to have the link to all radio stations for live radio streaming.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

LETS TALK ABOUT PHISHING

This is not a class of definition of terms so am not gonna define what phishing is. However its is important to note that phishing is a serious security issue especially in the face of social networking. Alot of sites will masquerade as genuine sites while attempting to gather personal information such as username, passwords, credit card numbers etc. Oops i think i just defined  phishing, no harm anyway.

Now am gonna use an example here of a website masquerading as twitter. if you click on this link. you will be redirected to a page which resembles the twitter login but after close scrutiny you will realize that there are alot of differences.

So what do users need to look out for?

1. Check out the address. 

The first address  is clearly not twitter and all one needs to do is make sure that they spare just a few seconds to verify the spelling in the address. You know contrary to popular maxim its never a machine error but a human one.

2. check out website identity by use of security certificate.

This might seem like a very complicated process but its simple and based on the step above. If you farther want to confirm the validity of the website click on the left of the address as shown below. 

Well the images are not very sharp but they serve the purpose just as well. what we are relying on here are the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. The genuine twitter address provides ownership information and the verifying authority also known as certificate authority. On the other hand the other address doesn't provide any information and therefore providing your username and password will only mean that you are selling yourself. 

So make sure you double check and be responsible for your security while in the cyber space.

WHEN WAS THIS WEBSITE LAST UPDATED?

This is one of those questions most people tend to ask themselves quite often. Well ask no more for in this post you will find out precisely when to the nearest second. I am not sure about using other website images on my blog due to copyright issues so am gonna use the sister blog for demonstration. You can visit it by clicking on this link.

As you will see, it’s clearly indicated that the post was made on May 14^th 2012. However we need to ascertain whether that is true.  Am using Mozilla firefox  version 3.6 by the way. 

1.      On the menu bar click on tools.

2.      Then click on page info. 

 

1.      This brings up a popup window as the one show below.

As you will see under the general tab there is just so much information about the current web page. Specifically this one confirms that I actually made that post on may the 14^th. Visit any other site and it will give you the same information and also whether is an encrypted website and if so the algorithm used!!

SO HOW LONG HAS THE WEBSITE BEEN UP?

For whatever reason you might want to find out how long a website has been running. Well you simply follow this link. Use the way back machine which will give you an experience like a time machine on how a certain website looked the first time it went live and all the changes that it has been through.

CISPA, AGAIN!

Mid last month(June) I posted about the implications CISPA will have in our lives if its passed into law. If you didn’t find that article it can be found here.  Now  3 days later something happened to me that changed my whole view of the bill and since then I  have wished I didn’t post  it in the first place.

My laptop got stolen by somebody I had known . This guy who  took my laptop had been a high school buddy and it had  been a while since we talked, then on this one Thursday I receive a call from a number not in my phone-book. Well to cut a long story short he made away with my  laptop. I however managed get the registration number of the vehicle he was using.

So filled with my Nikita episodes I thought all the details I had would be enough to track him. So I went to the CID police and reported the matter but then reality check hit me there and then. It was not gonna be easy. I thought all they needed to do was query some database with the registration number and just like that a name would pop up plus other vital information. It turned out to be a process filled with bureaucracy one would think we are back to the cold war. 

 Then it dawned to me, if CISPA was there today and not just in the USA but right here in Kenya it would be a different story all together.  The airtel number he used to call me  would have  shown all the other numbers he called  and that information quickly passed to the CID officers. This might show the ID number which can then be used to query  bank accounts  and an alert placed should the culprit use an ATM or simply perform a transaction at a bank. All over sudden I had became a master of investigation but it was just a dream.

So whatever opinion I voiced against The CISPA bill i take it back for now I know so much more is at stake if its not implemented and very fast for that matter