Tag: NETWORK

Just a little under two months after its release candidate went live, Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011 has been finalized and released into the wild. The new version of Microsoft's slick, do-it-all server OS is a big step forward from its predecessor. Built on the Windows Server 2008 R2 base, Home Server 2011 features a simpler dashboard, a better backup solution, dead simple remote access to ...

Want a nice, simple way to access files on your Android smartphone over a wireless network? Check out Samba Filesharing, an easy-to-configure app which lets you browse your SD card contents in your favorite desktop file manager. After you install the app, launch it and create a password -- the default username is SDCARD, though you can change that if you wish. Once your changes have been made, ...

Keeping the computers on your home network can be a messy business, but Kaspersky has a solution which can make things a bit easier to manage. Their re-tooled Pure Total Security suite offers full-spectrum network protection from malware defense to backups to parental controls. Pure packs a ton of functionality, including malware protection, firewall, spam and phishing protection, backup and ...

This week we're running a series of posts that tackle common Windows networking issues, and some tips and tricks that might speed up or improve your network stability. You can find more tech tips in our Tips index. There are plenty of good reasons to use a custom DNS server on your computers. Some services -- like Google DNS -- can provide a speed boost to your Web browsing. Other services -- ...

This week we're running a series of posts that tackle common Windows networking issues, and some tips and tricks that might speed up or improve your network stability. You can find more tech tips in our Tips index. One small Windows XP feature I used to lean on frequently was "Connect To" -- it provided easy access to a computer's network connections right from the Start Menu. I also like ...

The blogosphere is abuzz this morning, and it's a new Web browser called RockMelt garnering a lot of the attention. While we here at Download Squad haven't been hand-picked to test the beta yet, we're not exactly in a hurry. Why? Because while it's new, we're not sure RockMelt is actually revolutionary. Over at Engadget, Joanna Stern did get to play with the browser. From the looks of her ...

As you can gather from the title, Crack Attack is not a Flash game. It's a time waster that you have to download; we don't see too many of those around here. Having to download a game is a pretty hefty barrier to entrance, so a downloadable game has to be really good for me to cover it. This one is. In fact, my girlfriend (a leading authority on Crack Attack) goes so far as to describe it as ...

Speaking at the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Facebook's Tom Cook presented a slide that puts Facebook's rapid user growth into perspective. Actual numbers were carefully omitted, but Data Center Knowledge performed some easy deduction to conclude that the top peak represents 60,000 servers. The plateau towards the end of 2009 represents 30,000 servers -- so they've installed 30,000 servers ...

If you're an IT Administrator (or even a developer who's lucky enough to "own" the server your apps run on), you've seen this go down before - you're out and about, having a great time when the phone rings. Something is horribly broken and needs your magic touch right away. Surely it's as simple as bouncing a system process - 2 minutes tops! Unfortunately, you're nowhere near a PC to type in ...

I'm blown away by how many of my customers have three or four chat programs installed on their computers. I'm even more blown away by how many of them wind up with malware after letting their curiosity get the best of them and clicking a link some unknown user sends via those chat apps. If only they'd switch to something smarter, like a multi-network app...and maybe one that had some kind of ...

Google has just announced plans to deploy insanely fast broadband to between 50,000 and 500,000 households in the U.S. They say they're going to offer the service at "competitive prices". It doesn't mean they're going into the business as an ISP per se (even though 500,000 households is not exactly a tiny number), but they're mainly going to use it as a large-scale connectivity experiment. ...

In what must surely be a sign that schools and universities are under-funded, a network security dude at the University of Georgia has just been arrested for shaking down multiple file-downloading students. Two weeks ago he approached a female student and said he could make the "situation go away in exchange for money" -- he was promising to keep the data private, rather than forward it to the ...

The chicken and the egg -- you can't have one without the other -- but which one comes first? The same dilemma plagues every industry, but none as much as the tech sector. Build it and they will come -- but what if they don't come?! You've just wasted millions of dollars -- or billions, in the case of IPv6 infrastructure. But such is life! Someone has to break the ice. Someone has to be the ...

In a case of a good-defence-is-a-good-offence, a team of nerds led by a researcher from security company FireEye has just brought down the Mega-D botnet. This particular botnet accounted for some 12 percent of all spam email and was controlled by servers in Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. A botnet, if you're not down with script-kiddie hax0r lingo, is a 'bot network'. A bot is a robot -- though ...

Don your tin foil hats, ladies and gentlemen. Take the following news with a pinch of salt and admire their noble privacy policy. Now brace yourself: Google, with the benevolent and seemingly-altruistic intent of speeding up the Internet, have just launched a public DNS service. What is DNS? Computers on the Internet don't actually have names -- they have numerical IP addresses. DNS maps names ...