H4CKER.cc

Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice

H4CKER — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:24:37 +0000

Google Voice is great, but it isn’t an entirely free voice-over-internet service if you have to pay a phone bill to use it. With a few tweaks, though, you can make completely free internet phone calls with Google Voice.

What You’ll Need

* Google Voice account: Google Voice is a free service that, as of June 22nd (today if you’re reading this when it published), is available for everyone in the U.S. and Canada. All you need to use it is your Google account, so head to the Google Voice homepage and sign on in to get started (if you haven’t already).
* Sipgate account & phone number: Both are free—even the real phone number that folks can call you on all they want. Sipgate has many neat services to recommend it beyond its free Sipgate One service-with some cheap hardware, you could set up what amounts to a very cheap digital phone network, in your house or with a small telecommuting team. For now, though, we’re just going to hook up a Sipgate One phone account and number up to Google Voice.
* Audio tools for computer calls: You can make and take phone calls using your laptop’s microphone and speakers, but if you’re going to be talking regularly, you’ll probably want to upgrade to decent USB headset with microphone.
* Cellphone with text messaging: Just for a verification code that Sipgate sends. You won’t need the cellphone to actually use your free VoIP setup.

More information [lifehacker]

Images of Internet Explorer 9′s new interface leaked

H4CKER — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:26:55 +0000

This Chinese page purportedly features a couple of leaked screenshots of IE9′s new GUI. I don’t know if it’s the real thing, but if it is, Microsoft are doing something very bold here. The general design is reminiscent of the new Windows Phone 7, with a clean, angular look and graphics that are “cut” on the edge of the window (like that back button in the top-left corner). Even if it’s just a mock-up, it’s still quite impressive, and an interesting break from what we’ve come to know from Firefox, Chrome and Opera, not to mention previous versions of IE.

I’ll let Google Translate do the talking here: “New version of IE 9 preview version of the title bar of the platform, integrating the address bar, tool bar, search box, the status bar. Click the page title to display the address bar (and the search box, favorites management, access history viewer), the website finish loading cases, the address bar to display only part of the title page.” (Any native Chinese speakers here are welcome to submit a better translation via the comments.)

What do you think, people? April Fool’s or the real deal?

More information (Chinese page) [livesino.net]

You can finally remove participants from a Wave

H4CKER — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:19:13 +0000

Google is slowly but steadily adding all of the basic features into Wave. Recently they added email notifications, and not long before that they added access permissions. Now they’ve knocked out another one of those “must have” features; being able to remove someone from a wave.

ou can read more about it on the Google Wave Help site.

More information [GoogleWave]

Internet Explorer 9 – HTML5 video, faster than Chrome!

H4CKER — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:30:56 +0000

They’ve just showed off hardware-accelerated HTML5 at the MIX10 keynote, and it’s damn impressive. Main points:

* Full-screen, HD-encoded video on netbooks — the keynote highlighted the dropped frames in Chrome, while IE9 rendered it fine — made possible by the hardware decoder on the netbook.
* Multiple HTML5 videos on one page? — then they scroll the page down… and there are two HTML5 videos playing full-screen, on the same document! Using only half the CPU (while Chrome used 100%). Can’t see a reason you’d have two full-screen videos on the same page, but it leads into…
* A richer, more animated Web — the demo showed off a video carousel. Rather than the four icons at the top of the Download Squad page, you might see a carousel that rotates. Done entirely in HTML5; no Flash or Silverlight required.

The IE9 keynote has finished, so we’ve now had all of the details. Microsoft says they will be releasing a new Developer Preview (download it here) every 8 weeks — I wonder when it will become a full-blown beta. Surely this year…

More information [Downloadsquad]

Legendary Microsoft Game SkiFree Now Free for the iPhone

H4CKER — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:17:04 +0000

This news would have made my week if not for one little caveat: “Upcoming Features Include: Snow Monster.” It’s like a Rolling Stones reunion tour without Keith Richards.

More information [Gizmodo]

SkiFree! for iPhone

Ubuntu finally gets new logo and looks in 10.04

H4CKER — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:50:14 +0000

Ubuntu has been the “Flagship Linux” distro for quite a while now. This is the distro most people judge Linux by (and the only one I personally work with). However, its visual style remained constant for a long time, and has been starting to look a bit stale. It’s difficult to convey “innovation” to end users when your product keeps the same look, version to version.

There’s been a lot of talk of changing this, and yesterday Ubuntu finally announced their new look for Lucid Lynx, dubbed “Light”. It includes a new logo (both light and dark), new theme (light and dark), bootsplash, and even logos for the Ubuntu forums, Xubuntu and other related projects. I’ve put up the theme and splash screen after the jump, and you can see more eye-candy on the announcement page itself.

More information [downloadsquad]

Televisions Are Born In Places Like This

H4CKER — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:42:54 +0000

This man is tightening a mold in a Samsung factory in Kaluga, Russia. Inside that mold is a portion of what will soon be a television. Let’s take a tour of the rest of the factory.

Samsung opened this particular factory in 2008 and its been putting out products ever since. Aside from quality inspections, it appears that from the moment components arrive in gigantic sacks from Korea nearly everything is automated in this factory—from hot plastic being piped into molds to microcircuits being produced to the little logos being stamped onto panels. Humans mostly oversee the production and yes, occasionally tighten molds.

More information [Gizmodo]

Top 10 Torrent Sites Soon Without Mininova

H4CKER — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:29:32 +0000

Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.

It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.

Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG
#2 TORRENTZ.COM (RECOMMENDED!)
#3 ISOHUNT.COM
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET
#6 DEMONOID.COM
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET
#8 MONOVA.ORG
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM
#10 MININOVA.ORG

As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.

More information [Torrent Freak]

How To Quickly Investigate A Fake BitTorrent Tracker

H4CKER — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:01:24 +0000

It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ’scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ’scrape.php’ – download it.

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ’scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.

More information [TorrentFreak]

8 Things That Suck About the iPad

H4CKER — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:05:52 +0000

1) Big, Ugly Bezel.
2) No Multitasking.
3) No Cameras.
4) Touch Keyboard.
5) No HDMI Out.
6) The Name iPad.
7) No Flash.
and) Adapters, Adapters, Adapters?.

Update: Why stop at 8? Here are more things we are discovering that suck about the iPad.
9) It’s Not Widescreen.
10) Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G.
11) A Closed App Ecosystem.
12) And more…

More information [Gizmodo]