uTorrent is my personal choice in the world that is torrent clients. It’s a dream to use it, sleek, fast and has an epic web-ui that lets me manage my torrents remotely. Now they’re taking it one step further and it’s “apparently” going to clog the tubes that connect everyone on the internet together.

A lot of buzz around the net today has been generated by Richard Bennett, with his article “BitTorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers”. There’s just one problem with it – it’s utter rubbish.

We’ve mentioned Richard Bennett before, he was at the FCC hearing back in February, dealing with the Comcast-Sandvine issue. At the time, as we noted, he made the statement “If we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the Internet”. With uTorrent’s new transfer protocol (uTP) that’s currently being tested in an early Alpha release of the BitTorrent client, Bennett sees another potential threat.

Continue reading or comment at TorrentFreak

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I’ve been a fan of House since it started back in 2004. At first it was pretty epic, this arrogant doctor not caring what anyone wants of him as long as he gets his solution to a puzzle. The puzzle being the random medical condition that his patients would present to him.

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Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.7 is available for the beta testers amongst us. Featuring a highly polished and reworked admin CP and a lot of changes, its one of the biggest WordPress releases to date.

With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7.  280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.

We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out.  Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be.  As always, back up your blog before upgrading.

Continue reading or comment at WordPress.org

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

After the alleged source of 70% of the internets spam was shut down it is back on the rise again!

Matt Sergeant of Symantec-MessageLabs has stated that in recent days spam levels have once again climbed to a startling 37% of the original capacity. It is expected that with the passing of another couple weeks spam levels will be back up to their original levels, if not exceeding those numbers.

More details are available at thathappened or on our original McColo Spam post.

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As a follow up to my post on saving time if you use windows - i thought it would be a great addition if I where to publish a list of time saving tips for the Ubuntu user. PCMag has been so kind as to help with this list and it starts as follows:

System performance

1. Shorten the boot menu timeout
If you’re fed up of waiting for the boot menu to timeout before your favourite operating system launches, open ‘/boot/grub/menu.lst’ with a text editor and look for the line starting with ‘timeout’. Just lower the number to its the right. This is the number of seconds the menu system will wait before booting the default operating system (0 or 1 is not recommended).

2. Monitor boot performance
One of the best utilities you can install for checking your system’s performance is called ‘bootchart’. After installation and a reboot, ‘bootchart’ will create a complex graph of everything that’s running and taking up resources as your system boots, and place an image of the graph in the /var/log/bootgraph folder.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The top torrent client is finally available for MAC users with the release of uTorrent for MAC. Its still in beta, but it looks neat and clean and comes with its signature lightweight footprint. If you haven’t used uTorrent before there are plenty of guides available, otherwise head over to the download page.

Now the lightweight power and performance of µTorrent available for your Mac.

This is beta software, and may contain serious bugs. We think it’s stable enough to share and hope your feedback will help us improve it.

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Lufthansa have created a little flash game where you need to, in a short amount of time, pin point a European city on a map. As you progress through the levels there are less and less clues and the selection time becomes less. Play it now!

Whats your final score?

Image by via CrunchBase

Fedora 10 has officially been released six months after Fedora 9. The highlighted features include OpenOffice 3.0, new virtualization features, internet connection sharing, faster booting, and a new security tool.

Read the full changelog or the article at LifeHacker for more information.

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Being productive is almost everyones goal, and normally with a few small tweaks to your Windows machine you can easily double or even tripple your productivity.

1. # Reduce the Number of Auto-starting Programs
   As your PC ages, it tends to get filled with a lot of auto-starting programs. These programs may be things you do indeed use a lot, but do they need to be started every time you boot your PC? You can remove unnecessary programs and services from starting-up automatically by downloading an app such as RevoUninstaller. RevoUnintaller is great for doing this because it tells you if the application is critical to the system and if it’s safe to disable.
2. # Configure Windows Updates Properly
   There’s one very annoying thing about Windows Update. After it has downloaded the latest patches and fixes, it will constantly send up pop-up reminders asking you to restart your PC. You not only lose time clicking the ‘Restart Later’ button, but if you accidentally press the ‘Restart Now’ button or if it restarts your PC automatically, you can loose valuable data.

   To disable this behavior, right-click on ‘My Computer’, go to the ‘Automatic Updates’ tab, and select the 2nd option: ‘Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them’. Click ‘OK’ and you’re done.

3. # Get Mozilla Firefox
   Firefox is the best browser, period. It’s one of the fastest browsers and it’s limitlessly customizable. If you don’t use Firefox as your browser, you’re not maximizing your output. Firefox has a lot of plugins but these two posts will point you to the best ones:

   * 25 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Bloggers
   * 50 Best Firefox Extensions for Power Surfing

4. # Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
   Most of the time it’s much faster to navigate Windows with a keyboard than with a mouse. This is especially true with applications such as your browser and your word processor. Learn keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be saving a lot of time everyday.
5. # Get Digsby
   You probably have at least 3 instant messaging clients running on your PC at this moment. In addition to it being absolutely painful to search three services for someone’s name, it’s wasting a ton of time. The solution to your woes is Digsby. Digsby supports AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. It even supports Facebook Chat! So now you can manage your email and social networking accounts right from the window. To keep things under control, it features tabbed conversation windows. What more could you ask for?
6. # Declutter and Organize Your Desktop
   Clutter saps productivity. A clean and organized desktop will definitely make your more productive as you won’t have to sift through your collection of 91 desktop shortcuts. Remove the shortcuts to apps you don’t use regularly.
7. # Use MemoKeys
   Some of you might have heard of AutoHotKey and know that is a way to assign key strokes to actions. MemoKeys is similar, just a lot easier to use and configure. It saves you time by letting you call up commonly used text with keystroke combos.
8. # Uninstall Unneeded Software
   I’m sure your PC has lots and lots of programs that are just lying there, rotting away. Uninstall them! Removing the clutter from your PC will help you function better and get rid of distractions.
9. # Get RoboForm
   RoboForm is a must-have utility that stores your login info for every site, fills-in forms automatically, and has a random password generator. It’s very useful as it saves the time you spend filling in forms, searching for passwords, and trying to remember all your user ids and passwords. It’s not freeware but you can use the code GOOG1 to get $6 off.
10. # Use VLC Media Player
    Windows Media Player isn’t a good media player as it requires you to install codecs to play the more obscure formats. For this reason, VLC Media Player is a godsend as it can play virtually any media file you throw at it, including DVDs, CDs, and various streaming protocols.
11. # Automate PC Maintenance Tasks
    Doing things such as defragging your hard disk, running a virus/spyware scan, and backing-up your files manually can be cumbersome and time consuming. Instead, use Windows’ ‘Scheduled Tasks’. Some apps also have built-in schedulers available. A more intuitive utility to do this is WakeupOnStandBy.
12. # Use RadarSync to Automatically Update Programs and Drivers
    RadarSync can easily update most of your programs and drivers in one click. The premium version of RadarSync also allows you to schedule a scan for checking updates for your programs. A nice alternative to it is the FileHippo Update Checker.
13. # Organize Your Most Visited Programs & Folders in Start Menu
    For quick two-click access to your most visited programs and folder, I suggest you add them to the start menu. To reduce start menu clutter, I also suggest you change the number of most-frequented programs that Windows automatically displays in the Start Menu to 0. You can do this by right-clicking on the start button, make sure the radio box beside ‘Start menu’ is selected, and click ‘Customize’. You’ll find the setting I mentioned under ‘Programs’.
14. # Organize Your Most Visited Programs & Folders in the QuickStart Menu
    There’s one more way you can gain easy two-click access to your most-visited programs: through the QuickStart bar.
15. # Use Docks
    A Mac-like dock can make it very easy to open frequented apps, and it’s a great alternative to using desktop shortcuts to launch stuff. The two best dock programs in the market are RocketDock and ObjectDock.

Thanks to Ruchir for the list

The kind folks over at AVG have put together a document to help those whos computers may be infected with irritating virii and spyware.

Cleaning an infected computer today has become harder than ever. To effectively clean your system you must first learn a little about what you are trying to get rid of and what tools you need to get the job done. I’m going to try to give you some of the background, followed by the basics of getting rid of these pests.

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