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Is Hotel wifi safe for internet banking?
nothingbutquestions posted a topic in Computers, TVs, Software, Internet & Electronics
My previous room had an individual PLDT wifi. No longer. Now all I have available is the unsecured hotel wifi with a universal (hotel-wide) password. Is this as safe as it is going to get for my Internet banking online? -
Anyone using the Amazon fire stick for live streaming ? what internet speed is needed. appreciate comments, thanks
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They are promoting it now all over Cebu. Does somebody have it? Which area of Cebu. Reliability? Anything is helpful, thanks. -
Philippines has the second slowest internet speeds in Asia
Downbutnotout posted a topic in News, Headlines & World Events
This should not surprise anyone on this forum but I thought I would share. http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/489762/scitech/technology/list-philippines-ranks-21st-of-22-asian-countries-in-internet-download-speed Only Afghanistan which has been war-torn for years had slower internet download speeds compared to the Philippines. Even Cambodia and Vietnam are over twice as fast. And the Philippines ranked 176th out of 202 countries worldwide when it came to internet download speeds. -
China steps up internet censorship
contraman posted a topic in Computers, TVs, Software, Internet & Electronics
China is tightening its grip on the internet by requiring internet users to register their real names for some internet services and disrupting the services of businesses that give people the tools to circumvent the "Great Firewall". According to China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the new registration rule will apply to people who use services such as blogs, instant messaging services and online discussion forums. -
Inventor of World Wide Web warns of threat to internet
contraman posted a topic in Computers, TVs, Software, Internet & Electronics
The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users' privacy. https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/25126960/inventor-of-world-wide-web-warns-of-threat-to-internet/ -
Abusive users’ to blame for slow Internet
contraman posted a topic in Cell Phones - Applications, Calling & Texting
THE Philippine Long Distance Company (PLDT) blamed Wednesday “abusive users” for the slow internet speeds in the country. In Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate committee on trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship, PLDT head of Regulatory Affairs and Policies Ray Espinosa said the abusive behavior of some users slows the internet speeds of the entire network. “The abusive users are detriment to public service in terms of Internet service,” said Espinosa who represents both PLDT and Smart Communications of businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan.Espinosa said that the downloading of movies, which consumes a large volume of bandwidth, from various websites on the Internet also “destroys the public service altogether. He said internet subscribers have to use the Internet reasonably. The technical working group, however, said that the consumers do not know that rules for fair use policy exist due to its language, which is described as “vague.”Network stakeholders said the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) should use a measurement tool to determine consumption patterns of Internet subscribers.“It is merely a matter of the NTC approving what sort of measurement tool to use,” said Pierre Tito Galla, co-founder of Democracy.net.ph, said. More: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/business/2014/09/04/abusive-users-blame-slow-internet-363553 -
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133 How PLDT Deliberately Keeps Local Internet Traffic Slow and More Expensive In Philippines
David_LivinginTalisay posted a topic in Computers, TVs, Software, Internet & Electronics
http://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pldt_deliberately_keeps_local_internet/ Philippines How PLDT Deliberately Keeps Local Internet Traffic Slow and More Expensive In Philippines (self.Philippines) submitted 3 days ago * by vlodia Read all 61 comments... -
Is the Internet Making us Stupid?
contraman posted a topic in Computers, TVs, Software, Internet & Electronics
That's the question researchers from Wellington's Victoria University asked in a study on people's reading behaviour. And the answer is: yes. We might have more access to information than ever before, but reading things online actually has a negative impact on people's cognition. Associate professor Val Hooper and masters student Channa Herath's analysis of online and offline reading behaviour found that online reading generally does not have a positive impact on people's cognition. Concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates when engaging with online material were all much lower than traditional text. This despite people getting through more material thanks to skim reading and scanning online material.People also seem to become distracted when reading online due to emails, checking news, exploring hyperlinks and viewing video clips. People almost expect to be interrupted when they're on their computers," Dr Hooper said. While many respondents said they had learnt to read faster and more selectively, they also admitted they were more likely to remember material they had read offline. The study revealed it's still common practice for people to print out material they think is important. The data in Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Impact of the Internet on Reading Behaviour suggests people still read in a linear, print-based fashion even though we receive information in a different structure. Dr Hooper thinks it will take at least a generation for changes to the way people are taught how to read. If you think about how we're training our children to read, they're being trained by those who were trained in the linear fashion," she said.Long chunks of text no longer appeal to students, Dr Hooper said. -
Why The Philippines has slow internet speeds, according to..
spydoo posted a topic in Computers, Software & Electronics
Hi all. For those who are interested: from: http://forum.lol.garena.ph/showthread.php?50649 ISPs in Philippines - the real facts and why you should caretl;dr version: (not in order) Ping is not reliable, PLDT sucks, Garena needs to spend more on connectivity, use WinMTR instead of tracert, government needs public IX. Hi all, I'm a foreigner living in Manila that has spent the last 15 years building large scale networks in Europe, with a heavy focus on northern Europe. I apologize in advance that I do not speak Tagalog (yet) so I'm only able to write this in English. I've read a lot of posts here on the forums, and although they are mostly well meant, most are factually wrong. I contribute this to lack of knowledge in terms of carrier grade networking so it's completely understandable so let's start by defining what lag (latency) is. Also this is focused at our specific situation - playing LoL in Philippines. For a game such as LoL you have 4 layers of possible latency: 1) Consumer end (PC/Router/Bandwidth) 2) ISP 3) Interconnect/Transit 4) Server end (Servers, load balancers etc.) To measure latency end-to-end ICMP echo (PING) packets are not a reliable tool. There are many reasons for this but for us the main reason is that ICMP is a down prioritized packet type. Historically the ping tool was meant to see if a host was alive, not to measure connectivity - the reason it does have response times were to identify possible routing errors or DNS IP mixups. Remember this tool is older than most people playing LoL. On Windows 'tracert' uses ICMP echo requests to probe the route of the connection to your destination. If you do want to trace the route using ICMP echo I can recommend WinMTR as a replacement for tracert that is a lot faster and more accurate. WinMTR can be found here. The UNIX version has an option to do UDP based packets which is more relevant for us as UDP is usually used in online gaming because of reduced latency and overhead as compared to TCP. In Europe the infrastructure and government laws are usually very good and the laws enforced. This means that the most common causes of latency is on the consumer end. People mostly have ADSL connections and forget they have something running in the background (seeding is the main culprit in most cases) as with ADSL when you saturate your uplink you obliterate your downlink. But here in Philippines there are a lot of other causes for latency for us gamers - the worst being PLDT - yes you read that right, PLDT is intentionally disrupting online gaming in the Philippines. I will explain in greater detail below. PLDT (and SMART) are actively fighting interconnect laws here in the Philippines. This is done mostly because of the mobile market but internet (and thus gaming) suffers as a result. Because SMART (and with the purchase of Sun) has the dominant market share, they are not interested in interconnecting with other Telcos, but specifically they do not want Globe subscribers to be satisfied with Globe so they will switch to SMART - this is why they are limiting the interconnect between PLDT and Globe, they are essentially throttling the data exchange between the companies. This is against the law here in Philippines but as with a lot of other things here, money talks - morale walks. I assume you've experienced long delays on texting between Globe/SMART? Here is a recent article on the problem. Keep in mind that that interconnection is standard in other markets and I've never come across any other Telco being as manipulative towards their customers as PLDT/SMART. So what does SMS delays have to do with LoL latency you ask? Well the biggest problem here is that by default PLDT routes all domestic traffic via an IX in HK. This means if you send data between a PLDT DSL subscriber and any other major ISP here it goes via a Hong Kong Internet eXchange. There is a law passed in Philippines that all ISPs have to interconnect freely via an Internet eXchange so data can flow freely between the customers of the ISPs. Mind you this does not mean that a Globe/Sky/Bayan/Eastern customer can access data/servers outside PLDTs network, through PLDTs network - this is entirely between customers of the ISPs. This is common practice all over the world, even in dictatorships - except in Philippines. ISPs buy transit traffic through backbone providers like PACNET, Level3, UUNet etc. - these are the services that connect your ISP to the world, it's too expensive for all ISPs to run their own international backbone fibers. Because of PLDTs enormous power they have been able to defy the laws of interconnection and because of this keep prices up and bandwidth down as a whole in Philippines. I'm not saying that the other Telcos here are angels but at least their obey the law of interconnection. Doesn't it seem odd that Philippines is so far behind in terms of bandwidth/price for internet? It's literally 10 year behind Europe in it's current state. It's worth noting that Globe has a stake in the worlds most powerful sea fiber. This is why PLDT is scared that if they loose their stranglehold on the consumers here that they will realize that the competitor offers a superior product. Unfortunately Globe has some of the least educated support staff/customer service in Philippines so it's not all roses on the 'other side'. I can give you a concrete example of how full PLDT is of themselves - I was involved in a project in Philippines (which is when I fell in love with the country and moved here afterwards) that also involved PACNET. I was dumbfounded why the routing in Philippines was all over the place, I was trying to understand whom or what was the cause of this terrible infrastructure so I could fix it, eventually I narrowed it down to PLDT being incompetent. As I met with the senior technicians from PACNET regarding a multi-gigabit transit setup here in Manila I asked them why PLDTs routing was all over the place, as they are the major operator it was important for us to have good connectivity with PLDT. The PACNET technician and the senior sales manager explained to me that of all the countries they do business in, Philippines was the only place where a Telco willing and carelessly broke conventional international norms. PACNET had been dumbfounded when PLDT asked PACNET to pay PLDT when PLDT wanted to buy backbone capacity from PACNET. Their reasoning was that without PLDT you could not service the general public in Philippines properly so that's why PLDT should get money for allowing their customers direct access to PACNET. I'll let that sink in a little. PACNET is a company who's main business is SELLING backbone capacity across South East Asia and PLDT wanted PACNET to pay so PLDT could get backbone capacity from PACNET. It is so stupid that it completely blows my mind. Everything else they explain perfectly matched what I had seen examining the Philippines' internet infrastructure. Unfortunately to remedy this situation you need non-corrupt representatives that also understands technology or the need for improving the infrastructure as a whole in Philippines - not being able to vote here was a relief as I doubt there are any. To summarize: Garena needs to supply us with an IP where we can do UDP based pings to have reliable connectivity diagnostics. If Garena is relying solely on the standard connectivity at VITRO (ePLDT), then they need to invest in their own connectivity to Globe and Bayan/Sky. The Filipino government needs to create a unified IX, that mandates you have to interconnect a certain bandwidth pr. subscriber with a minimum bandwidth of 1 Gigabit. Make it so that you loose the right to do Telco services if you are not connected to the public IX. (this would solve all connectivity issues for someone like Garena at zero cost to Garena and all other companies doing online services in Philippines). Feel free to ask any questions - I have a lot of knowledge in this field, and I've skipped some parts of it here as my post would end up too lengthy, if it isn't already too long - in fact I'll put a tl;dr in the top- 16 replies
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Guys, this random foreigner wants to know your view on this subject: Im renting a house with internet, the owner shows me PLDT invoices every month. I did notice in last invoice that I'm also paying for a landline phone, but the phone at home is not working, no signal. I try to call to my supposed number (it's in the invoice I'm paying) and for my surprise it's ringing! So someone is having a landline for free. The owner of the house lived here before, so I guess she was using that landline number as her own, she did transfer to another subdivision, perhaps she did ask to change the phone address, but not the billing one. My question is, is it possible to divide the internet to one of the houses and the phone to the other address and having it all in the same invoice? I think it's very confusing, but it's the only logic I can find to this issue. I'm paying a lot for a very slow connection. And looking for the plans at PLDT site, it has no sense at all what I'm paying for.
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Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords
Knowdafish posted a topic in News, Headlines & World Events
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/feds-tell-web-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/ The best/most informative/most accurate/relevant part of the article is the last 2/3 in my opinion. The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed. If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused. "I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back." A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'" Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts. A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: "No, we don't, and we can't see a circumstance in which we would provide it." Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has "never" turned over a user's encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. "We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously," the spokesperson said. A Yahoo spokeswoman would not say whether the company had received such requests. The spokeswoman said: "If we receive a request from law enforcement for a user's password, we deny such requests on the grounds that they would allow overly broad access to our users' private information. If we are required to provide information, we do so only in the strictest interpretation of what is required by law." Apple, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users' passwords and how they would respond to them. Richard Lovejoy, a director of the Opera Software subsidiary that operates FastMail, said he doesn't recall receiving any such requests but that the company still has a relatively small number of users compared with its larger rivals. Because of that, he said, "we don't get a high volume" of U.S. government demands. The FBI declined to comment. Some details remain unclear, including when the requests began and whether the government demands are always targeted at individuals or seek entire password database dumps. The Patriot Act has been used to demand entire database dumps of phone call logs, and critics have suggested its use is broader. "The authority of the government is essentially limitless" under that law, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence committee, said at a Washington event this week. Large Internet companies have resisted the government's requests by arguing that "you don't have the right to operate the account as a person," according to a person familiar with the issue. "I don't know what happens when the government goes to smaller providers and demands user passwords," the person said. An attorney who represents Internet companies said he has not fielded government password requests, but "we've certainly had reset requests -- if you have the device in your possession, than a password reset is the easier way." Cracking the codes Even if the National Security Agency or the FBI successfully obtains an encrypted password, salt, and details about the algorithm used, unearthing a user's original password is hardly guaranteed. The odds of success depend in large part on two factors: the type of algorithm and the complexity of the password. Algorithms, known as hash functions, that are viewed as suitable for scrambling stored passwords are designed to be difficult to reverse. One popular hash function called MD5, for instance, transforms the phrase "National Security Agency" into this string of seemingly random characters: 84bd1c27b26f7be85b2742817bb8d43b. Computer scientists believe that, if a hash function is well-designed, the original phrase cannot be derived from the output. But modern computers, especially ones equipped with high-performance video cards, can test passwords scrambled with MD5 and other well-known hash algorithms at the rate of billions a second. One system using 25 Radeon-powered GPUs that was demonstrated at a conference last December tested 348 billion hashes per second, meaning it would crack a 14-character Windows XP password in six minutes. The best practice among Silicon Valley companies is to adopt far slower hash algorithms -- designed to take a large fraction of a second to scramble a password -- that have been intentionally crafted to make it more difficult and expensive for the NSA and other attackers to test every possible combination. One popular algorithm, used by Twitter and LinkedIn, is called bcrypt. A 2009 paper (PDF) by computer scientist Colin Percival estimated that it would cost a mere $4 to crack, in an average of one year, an 8-character bcrypt password composed only of letters. To do it in an average of one day, the hardware cost would jump to approximately $1,500. But if a password of the same length included numbers, asterisks, punctuation marks, and other special characters, the cost-per-year leaps to $130,000. Increasing the length to any 10 characters, Percival estimated in 2009, brings the estimated cracking cost to a staggering $1.2 billion. As computers have become more powerful, the cost of cracking bcrypt passwords has decreased. "I'd say as a rough ballpark, the current cost would be around 1/20th of the numbers I have in my paper," said Percival, who founded a company called Tarsnap Backup, which offers "online backups for the truly paranoid." Percival added that a government agency would likely use ASICs -- application-specific integrated circuits -- for password cracking because it's "the most cost-efficient -- at large scale -- approach." While developing Tarsnap, Percival devised an algorithm called scrypt, which he estimates can make the "cost of a hardware brute-force attack" against a hashed password as much as 4,000 times greater than bcrypt. Bcrypt was introduced (PDF) at a 1999 Usenix conference by Niels Provos, currently a distinguished engineer in Google's infrastructure group, and David Mazières, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. With the computers available today, "bcrypt won't pipeline very well in hardware," Mazières said, so it would "still be very expensive to do widespread cracking." Even if "the NSA is asking for access to hashed bcrypt passwords," Mazières said, "that doesn't necessarily mean they are cracking them." Easier approaches, he said, include an order to extract them from the server or network when the user logs in -- which has been done before -- or installing a keylogger at the client. Questions of law Whether the National Security Agency or FBI has the legal authority to demand that an Internet company divulge a hashed password, salt, and algorithm remains murky. "This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?" said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. "I don't know." Granick said she's not aware of any precedent for an Internet company "to provide passwords, encrypted or otherwise, or password algorithms to the government -- for the government to crack passwords and use them unsupervised." If the password will be used to log in to the account, she said, that's "prospective surveillance," which would require a wiretap order or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order. If the government can subsequently determine the password, "there's a concern that the provider is enabling unauthorized access to the user's account if they do that," Granick said. That could, she said, raise legal issues under the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and a former federal prosecutor, disagrees. First, he said, "impersonating someone is legal" for police to do as long as they do so under under court supervision through the Wiretap Act. Second, Kerr said, the possibility that passwords could be used to log into users' accounts is not sufficient legal grounds for a Web provider to refuse to divulge them. "I don't know how it would violate the Wiretap Act to get information lawfully only on the ground that the information might be used to commit a Wiretap violation," he said. The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt utility. The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment, which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to refuse the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could bring a criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives." In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled under the All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba Satellite laptop. Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the password holder is the target of an investigation -- and don't address when a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an innocent third party. "If you can figure out someone's password, you have the ability to reuse the account," which raises significant privacy concerns, said Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist at theElectronic Frontier Foundation. -
I found this interesting infographic that explains it. I couldn't get a 100% screen shot of it, but got maybe 95%.
