Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

If you share your internet connection at home and find yourself unable to host DOTA/Warcraft 3 games on Battle.net, it’s probably because you don’t know how to configure your router. Router configuration can be tricky business.

I used to use a D-Link router and for some strange reason, I can only host games with the DMZ mode in operation. I can’t seem to forward the Warcraft 3 ports properly. DMZ mode isn’t exactly recommended because of security issues.

However, it looks like I found a cure with the new router I bought. I moved out of my old place and had to get a new router for my new home, so I went shopping at Sim Lim, went into a shop and asked for their cheapest wireless router (my wife uses a laptop so a wireless router is necessary). I ended up bringing home TP-Link’s WL-G642.

To my pleasant surprise, configuring the router to host games on Battle.net was surprisingly simple. In the Port Triggering section under the Forwarding menu in the router admin panel, there is drop-down menu for common applications that require port forwarding. Guess what? One of the common applications is Battle.net!

I selected that option and all the necessary configuration was done. I logged onto Battle.net and could host games without turning on the DMZ mode. So, if you need a router that is simple to configure to host games on Battle.net, get this one. It’s quite cheap too. I got it for 55 bucks with 3 years warranty.

I’ve had experience configuring my old D-Link router so I could operate this one without reading the user guide. If you’re new to router configuration, the user manual is quite easy to understand. There are several levels of security options and the wireless signal strength is excellent. Apparently, the wireless transfer speed can go up to 108Mbps, although 54Mbps is quite sufficient. For 55 bucks, this router is certainly the most value for money compared to the more established router brands like D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, SMC etc.

I have always been amazed as to why web hosting packages by Singaporean companies are so much more inferior in terms of features compared to overseas companies, particularly those based in the United States.

When I signed up with my U.S. based web host, Hostmonster, almost a year ago, they were offering 50 gigabytes of storage space and 99 gigabytes of bandwidth monthly. I thought that it was fantastic because I was signed on with a local company at that time and I was getting only 100 megabytes of storage space and 1 gigabyte of monthly bandwidth. And, with the local company, I had to pay for the annual renewal of the domain name. Hostmonster gives the domain name to me FREE for as long as I remain with them. Even after currency conversion, the local company was only cheaper by an extra dollar every month, so I made the decision to switch.

I’ve not regretted switching. And things got even better after I signed up. Now Hostmonster offers 3,000 gig of storage (includes email storage) and 3,000 gig of monthly bandwidth, all for USD$5.95 (which works out to be about SGD$10) a month. Aside from hosting websites, I can share files that are too large to send by email to friends by uploading the files and giving them the link (much better than yousendit.com because there’s no time limit and the space and bandwidth limits as good as no limit). I think I can store almost infinite amount of emails (Gmail is only 2.8 gigabytes) with the 3,000 gig of space. And of course, with so much storage space, your web hosting account can become your personal online backup drive. I seriously think that SGD$10 per month is ridiculously cheap for the amount of space they are offering. And, I’ve not mentioned other goodies, such as the ability to host unlimited domains, create unlimited email accounts, FTP accounts, subdomains, parked domains, forwarding email accounts etc.

Let’s now compare the offering of a U.S based web hosting company with some Singapore based ones. I did a quick Google search and pulled out the offerings of 5 Singaporean web hosting companies.

Exxelnet - Basic Plan @ SGD$9.50 per month (300 megabytes storage and unlimited bandwidth. SGD$2.50 for every 5MB of additional storage space, SGD$12 a year for an additional 3 megabyte email account, SGD$50 per subdomain)

Cybersite - Economy Plan @ SGD$10 per month (150 megabytes web storage, 150 megabytes email storage and unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited email accounts, SGD$60 a year for additional 25 megabytes web storage, up to $3 per megabyte of additional email storage).

Webhosting.com.sg - Lite Plan @ SGD$13.95 per month (150 megabytes web storage, 100 megabytes email storage and unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited subdomains and email accounts).

Usonyx - SOLO Linux Plan @ SGD$8 per month (1 gigabyte storage and email space, 10 gigabyte monthly bandwidth. 10 email accounts).

Singhost.net - Standard Plan @ $12 per month (5 gigabytes storage and email space, 75 gigabytes monthly bandwidth. 50 email accounts, unlimited subdomains and FTP accounts).

Of all, Singhost.net offers the most decent package for a Singaporean web host companies. The rest are simply terrible and cannot be compared to U.S based companies. Check out a couple of other U.S based companies, such as IX Web Hosting and Dot5Hosting. Their offerings are pretty similar to what I am getting with Hostmonster, and all these companies I mentioned usually host at least 100,000 domains, so you can be sure that their service is pretty reliable, else they would have no business at all. If you need to get yourself a web presence or a nice email address (especially if it’s for personal or small business use), forget about Singapore based web hosting options.

Since I had an old laptop lying around, I decided to give it a new lease of life by installing Linux on it. The original XP has become unbearably slow, and I’m trying to test if I can live without Microsoft so I thought it would be a nice idea to try out Linux, the much touted free alternative OS to Microsoft.

I did some homework and settled for Simply Mepis 6.5, one of the various available Linux distros (think of distros as different brands of the same kind of product). Downloaded the iso image file and burned it onto a CD before popping it into my laptop that was previously cleaned up with Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN). DBAN is a great piece of software that’s free for personal use. It overwrites your harddisk with a string of zeros (all electronic information is stored in binary format, i.e. in combinations of zeros and ones), thus effectively destroying all information on the harddisk, especially if you let it run a few passes. Even data recovery professionals would be unable to recover the data. A nifty and must have tool if you want to donate/sell away an old computer. You don’t want the next owner to do data recovery and steal your passwords.

I used DBAN not because I need to destroy data, but I just wanted to get rid of all the data inside. Conventional formatting doesn’t clear out the old contents completely. With a nicely refreshed harddisk, I popped in the disc and it ran automatically. I clicked on install and after filling out some information, the installation detected and set up everything smoothly. Installation was a complete breeze.

The Mepis KDE desktop looked neat. It wasn’t hard for a native Windows user like me to use it. All the apps were working fine, except for the darn wireless. Spent a couple of hours looking for a solution online, but to no avail. For some strange reason, the wireless card DID manage to work a couple of times (out of the 40-50 times I tried to connect), so I don’t think the hardware is faulty. I decided to install another Linux distro, Ubuntu, to see if I have the same problem. So I downloaded Ubuntu 6.0.6 (also called Dapper Drake) and installed it. I couldn’t connect at all with Ubuntu.

I don’t suppose 2 popular distros are so lousy, so I guess it’s either the wireless card or the router (I’m more inclined to think it’s the former). I read alot of discussions on Linux forums about Cisco 350 series wireless cards being a pain in the neck, and different things work for different people, thus making things worse for a Linux newbie like me. Anyhow, I’m at my wits end now. I like the two distros that I tried, but I can’t use Linux if I can’t solve the wireless issue. The simplest way to prove that it’s the wireless card at fault would be to try another PCMCIA card, but I don’t think I want to shell out the money for another card that I am not sure will work.

All said, it’s a pretty good experience playing with Linux, save for this irritating problem. If there are any Linux experts out there who might have an idea about how to handle this issue, please contact me. I would love to tell money sucking Microsoft to kiss my laptop’s ass goodbye, provided I can get the wireless to work.

After having my blog badly screwed up for an hour last night by some spammer’s email harvesters, I’ve set up my defences, and I am going to return those spammers a favour. If you have noticed, I’ve put a whole series of links under the section called Anti-Spam in my right sidebar (you might have to scroll down to see it).

These irritating automated harvesting software work by scanning for email addresses on webpages, and then jump to another website via the hyperlinks on the page that it just scanned to continue the insidious activity. The @#$%^ harvester last night jumped around my blog so quickly that some of my wordpress plug-ins could not take the load and brought down the server. Since the harvesters like to jump around using hyperlinks to harvest emails, I’ve kindly provided them some links under the Anti-Spam section.

If you click on those links, you will be brought to pages that spews out large amounts of invalid email addresses randomly. Included in those pages are links to other pages that randomly generates large amounts of invalid email addresses. So any irritating harvester that comes by my page the next time will jump to those pages, grab all the invalid email addresses, jump to yet other pages that have large amounts of invalid email addresses to grab them. The cycle will continue and pretty soon that spammer’s server will just crash (and hopefully spew smoke as well).

To add to the fun, I’ve planted a number of totally invalid email addresses on my blog’s code which are invisible to humans but contain all kinds of funky ASCII characters that will make the harvester software go amok trying to interpret them. In addition, there’s a couple of “honey pots” on my blog as part of my effort to fight spam. The “honey pots” lure the spammer’s harvester to collect the email address and when the spammer sends junk mail to that email, the servers at projecthoneypot.org will be alerted and they will put out the spammer’s IP address publicly for law enforcement officers to track down the spammer.

(There are some Singaporeans harvesting email addresses to spam too. See this link from Project Honey Pot.)

If you’re interested to have some fun with the spammers’ email harvesting software, place the anti-spam links on your site or blog as well and let those buggers crash their own systems. *evil laugh*

I realised there’s alot of CPU exceeded message on my blog lately. I was looking at my logs and found some weird entries from the IP address: 62.163.80.205, so I went to do a google, and this was what I found from projecthoneypot.org:

The Project Honey Pot system has detected behavior from the IP address consistent with that of a spam harvester. Below we’ve reported some other data associated with this IP. This interrelated data helps map spammers’ networks and aids in law enforcement efforts.

If you’re interested, you may click on this link to go to the projecthoneypot website to check it out yourself.

These automated spammers and harvesters repeatedly loaded webpages on my blog, causing the server to go down. I’m in the midst of trying some tactics to track down the IP addresses of those harvesters/spammers and blocking those IP address from my site. I just banned over 50 ip addresses from my site. Hopefully, this will cause less errors.

I’m so sorry that my blog has continually gone down these couple of days. From my logs, it’s an unprecedented case. I’ve been attacked for the past couple of weeks, and especially the last few days. Rest assure that I’m trying to keep on top of things. In the meantime, I seek your kind understanding if you visit my blog and found it down.

Someone posted an irrelevant comment on my previous blog entry and it somehow got caught in my spam filter. I read the comment more closely and discovered the commenter posted several links to a site called YouPorn.com, and the links are to a lovemaking couple that the commenter claims to be “evidently Singaporean”.

There are two main issues to this matter. The first is a porn version of YouTube. It should come as no surprise to me as a student of new media that the porn cousin of YouTube has finally made its appearance. After all, it is well known that the most profitable online businesses belong to the pornography industry. The appearance of YouPorn (notice how the name is deliberately made similar to YouTube) brings about many implications.

The first of course is whether the porn industry is going to go bust now that free porn of pretty acceptable quality is available to anyone with an Internet browser. The second implication is that ease of accessibility to pornography to minors just went up another level. I do not object to pornography for adults, but I am concerned about young, impressionable kids who might be watching the videos in their own bedrooms without any form of guidance. The last implication, which coincides with the second issue I’m going to deal with, is the issue of ordinary folks uploading their own making out videos online.

I cannot verify whether the couple in the YouPorn video are indeed Singaporeans, although I am of the opinion that there’s a high probability. Assuming that the couple is indeed Singaporean, then we are looking at Tammy version 2.0. And the same old questions that were being asked during the Tammy saga will surface again, especially questions of morality. To what extent can we accept exhibitionism in Singapore?

I think YouPorn is going to be an interesting case for many countries in the world. YouTube has already caused quite a fair bit of problems in terms of copyright issues. YouPorn has the potential to cause not only copyright issues (with the pornography industry), but it will also cause moral panic. I’m going to wait and see how the issue of YouPorn will pan out across the world.

Note:

I am not re-posting the links to the video that was supplied by the original commenter because I am not sure if I will be contravening any Singapore law on pornography in doing so. Although I have a policy of allowing free speech, I’m not permitting any comment that contains links to the videos for the reason stated in the preceding sentence. I hope everyone understands that this is a grey area in terms of law.

Today I attended the Industry Advisory Council (IAC) meeting by my department. A short background for those who do not know what the IAC is about, basically my department (the Communications and New Media Programme) meets with communications industry professionals once a year to seek feedback on the relevance of our curriculum to the industry. In addition, there are panel discussions from the industry professionals about on-going trends in the new media industry.

The organisations represented on the IAC are pretty impressive. They include Singapore Airlines, Singapore Press Holdings, Lenovo Asia Pacific, IDA, MDA, Universal McCann, Singtel, George Lucas Educational Foundation, International Game Developer’s Association of Singapore (IGDA), Proximity Singapore, PR Communications, Red Shoe Communications, Institute of Policy Studies and Wordsmith Consultancy. I think it’s a pretty impressive list.

What I found really interesting and heartening is that almost all the organisations were unanimous in their assessment of new media. They think that new media is powerful. Blogs came up for mention several times. I think Stephen Forshaw, the Vice-President of Public Affairs in SIA probably summed things up best when he said that with new media, reputation that organisations carefully build up for years can be gone in a matter of hours, not days. He raised the case of Dell, where one blogger complained, some bloggers picked up the complaint to comment, and subsequently, even more bloggers picked up the complaint to write about. It became a self-sustaining negative viral campaign, and Dell’s image went down the drain in a matter of hours.

I’m very glad that at the very least, private companies appreciate the power of the blogosphere. Now that anyone has the ability to be a publisher, it is very difficult to control publicity online once the spread starts. Like a contagious flu bug, good and bad news will jump from one blog to another, one discussion forum to another, and from blogs to forums and vice-versa. It’s a public relations nightmare, especially when you have a high percentage of population with access to the Internet. In the past, a public relations practitioner could probably have some degree of ability to control damage from bad publicity by dealing with the media outlets, which usually isn’t that many. However, I’m fairly certain that it’s impossible to do damage control with thousands, if not tens of thousand of blogs.

What I learnt today, coupled with the internet “counter-insurgency” initiative announced by the government a couple of weeks ago is that everyone agrees (directly or indirectly) that bloggers are collectively powerful. Notice the word collective. One blogger cannot make a difference. When many bloggers band together, there’s strength in unity. Yet, even though the collective strength of bloggers are so powerful, it would be wishful thinking on the part of anyone to try and even attempt to control this monstrous strength. This is because the blogging community is an extremely fragmented bunch. Everyone has a different agenda. It is almost impossible to make everyone agree, unless they want to agree. Therefore, the power of blogosphere has manifested only on a few occassions where an incident strikes a common chord with majority of the bloggers (think Wee Shu-min).

I think Singaporean bloggers should celebrate their status as a blogger, because we are a part of this massive global revolution in communication. For too long, we have been deemed as frivolous by the mainstream media and government leaders. It is time to change that mindset.

Power to the bloggers.

If you have had some problems accessing my blog the past few days, it’s because I’ve moved servers and the move took a while to complete.

There was nothing wrong with my old host, Singaporewebhosting. The owner provides an excellent personal touch to his service, and I really appreciate that. However, it did not offer me sufficient storage space and bandwidth. I’ve been trying to cut corners here and there to try and manage within the limits of the plan I signed up for.

I was wondering if I could get a better deal for the amount of money I paid, so I decided to shop around for a better host, and I found Hostmonster. It’s really a monster in terms of the amount of disk space and bandwidth offered. A grand total of 50 gigabytes of web storage space and 999 gigabyte of bandwidth monthly, all for USD$3.95 a month (works out to be approximately SGD$7 a month).

Sounds too good to be true? I did think that it was too good to be true, until I did some homework. I went to Google and searched for sites hosted by Hostmonster to see if the loading times were good. I tried their helpdesk, which was amazingly responsive. Tickets were responded to between 15 to 30 minutes of submission, and you get a response from a customer service officer within 5 minutes of using their LiveChat support.

I decided to give it a shot. My account was activated immediately, and within 24 hours, the nameservers completed the propagation of DNS across the internet. And yes, I got my 50 gigabytes of web storage and 999 gigabytes of bandwidth. Loading time of my webpages seemed faster than my previous host. Their customer FAQ knowledge base was also pretty well written and covered a fairly wide range of topics.

The best part, in my opinion, is that the CEO takes the lead in customer service! He has his own blog, and he’s pretty darn frank about the good and bad of his company (note that his blog talks about Bluehost, a different hosting company but Hostmonster is actually a sister company of Bluehost, and they use the same physical infrastructure). If you don’t believe me, check out this post, where he was completely upfront about the serious server problems that occured last couple of months. After reading it, I feel completely at ease with being their customer. I don’t think that it is likely that they will just disappear without a word. Great customer service culture, and certainly goes a long way to keep their existing customers!

So far, it’s been quite a good ride with them, and I hope that I will not experience any problems. I don’t think Hostmonster wants to give me any problems too, because I am pretty darn frank in what I write, good or bad. Until you hear another update from me, it’s all been good and I strongly recommend Hostmonster if you need more diskspace and bandwidth than you can ever use.

If you think my analysis is useful and has helped you to decide on signing up, use the link below to sign up. It won’t cost you a cent, but you’ll help me get a little cash to fund my site.