The Four-eyed Journal

LifeHacker’s Hive Five series calls for the best FTP Clients out there. My vote goes to FileZilla.

I made the switch to it after using CuteFTP about two years ago. FileZilla simply worked and worked well for me when it comes to uploading and downloading files from the numerous blogs I’ve owned, setup, fixed, maintained and upgraded including those that belonged to my fellow bloggers and friends.

FileZilla is a free and open-source that is "fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface."

Looking at the current comments/votes on the LifeHacker post, it looks that FileZilla is currently in the lead.

Check out LifeHacker and vote for your ‘Best FTP Client‘ now.

Now it’s your turn, which do you think is the best FTP client out there?

*Hive Five is a feature series that asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question LifeHacker gets — "Which tool is the best?" It is a weekly series on LifeHacker and so far, the project has been awesome.

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Since the launching of Cuil has created much buzz in the internet, with many prominent netizens giving the newest search engine on the block positive reviews, there’s this consistent talk that it could give Google some serious competition.

After all, most of the folks behind Cuil are former Googlers and so this is something definitely worth taking seriously, especially for Google.

Cuil boasts that is has over 121 Billion web pages in its index and its new way of presenting search results is definitely something nice and refreshing. There are still bugs and kinks even spam in its search results but Cuil is just starting out and so things will be fixed and improved as time goes on and if the positive buzz around it grows into a community of fans and power users.

Sure Google still offers the best search results and the internet practically revolves around Google, but lately, the big G has been gaining some flak, like it’s perceived dominance of online advertising, it’s silent war against paid text link advertising (read: PR penalties), and most recently, its perceived attempt to retake the huge traffic to Wikipedia for itself and make huge money off it with Knol.

The collapse of the Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition has humiliated the former while the latter has compromised with Google, so alternatives like Cuil are becoming more and more attractive to the rest of us netizens.

However, Google seems to have taken notice and have sent out a strong message:
1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs have now been indexed by their systems.

Note that they said unique URLs not web pages, giving the impression that web pages are not that significant a measure of how big a search index is, but the number of unique URLs. They even gave a lengthy explanation as to why:

We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So Google continues to flex its muscles and uses its influence on the web, reminding all of us that Google has pwnd the internet!

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Try it. Hit F11 on the Firefox window of your choice and presto! It’s now on full screen mode removing the menu and tool bars and even the status bar from view.

In this way, you can fully focus on the web page you’re working on like reading lots of online text or in my case, writing this post in full screen mode. It’s a workaround to the inability of who doesn’t use the rich-text editor in WordPress to still enjoy writing their posts in full-screen mode. Well sort of.

Anyways, it’s a good way of getting free from the distractions of your desktop when doing online work, like blogging, blog-hopping, reading online text, even watching online videos. It could even give you massive over doses of your favorite online media sites or services. Can’t get enough of your friends’ Plurks? Try Plurking in full screen mode. That way you won’t feel over whelmed by all the sudden rush of new plurks and responses.

The full screen mode really grabs hold of your desktop. Even IM notification pop-ups and private message windows do not pop-up from no where. You do hear the alert sounds but Firefox keeps them behind your browser. Pretty neat for someone like me who has a little tendency to relapse into his short-attention span days.

Still, you can navigate to other windows by using the ALT+Tab key should you really need to. I haven’t tried Internet Explorer in full screen mode as well as the other browsers on my notebook like Opera and Safari. Though I doubt I’ll have a taste of what it’s like in IE because it’s been a year since I last used the darn browser at home.

Well that’s it for this little write-up about another neat feature of Firefox. It’s nothing special but something that could really do wonders for some of us who wants to really focus on things we’re working on, literally, once in a while.

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Here’s an interesting news written by Michael Hatamoto of BetaNews about online banking in the US:

Study says bank Web sites leave clients vulnerable to theft

When you hop on the Internet to check your online bank statement or pay some bills, do you ever wonder how secure your bank’s computer network is? A new study claims most bank Web sites are vulnerable to identity theft.
A study done by Atul Prakash, a professor at the University of Michigan who teaches in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, found that more than 75 percent of 214 financial institutions checked in 2006 had at least one design flaw that could open up online bank users to potential identity theft. (source)

Sounds scary indeed right? Well that’s in the United States, I wonder if there’s a similar study that focuses on our local banks here in the Philippines. With the increasing rate of internet penetration, the popularity of money-less transactions via mobile phones and the internet, especially with the spread of a fully-functional PayPal services and other online banking services, security concerns over this emerging field will slowly begin to hog headlines and buzz on Philippine cyberspace.

So far, I’ve not been an active user of online banking. I only use UnionBank’s website to check my EON account to see how much money I have left in the bank or to see if my blog earnings have finally been remitted via PayPal.

My international transactions like paying for domains, webhosting and a few subscriptions to online services are all done with PayPal and so far I feel safe with them.

On the other hand, I still do local transactions ‘manually’, I still personally do the following: deposit the payments to local bank accounts of merchants I deal with, pay internet and telephone bills at their business centers, and I only use my EON card to withdraw cash from ATM machines for my daily and school expenses.

Though I’m a regular user of Globe’s G-Cash service but anything above Php3,000.00 I revert to local bank deposits or in-store transactions. And yes, up to now, I’ve never used my EON card to pay for things I’ve bought. Handing out cash payments still gives me the highest assurance that my money went to the right pockets.

Or maybe I’m just being paranoid. Since I reckon online banking is not that popular, yet, here in the country, bad guys are not that interested in it yet. Then again I may be wrong.

Anyone else having similar thoughts? What about those who are active in using online banking? Do you feel safe every time you do online banking?

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Long before my blogging days, I have always read from the forums I frequented, read from websites and in signs in most internet shops that I should be very careful of any email I receive that has an attachment.

They were right, because back then and even up to now, viruses, worms, trojans and other badware are spread through email via attachments. However I was a bit puzzled. If that were really true, then how come my computer has never been infected by such badware when in fact I had the habit of checking out what those email attachments were. Plus, the rise of email groups which we used in classes to share notes, lectures and readings also needed to have a look at attachments to emails I’ve received.

I’m not kidding, the only way my computer was ever invaded by viruses, et. al were through infected diskettes and later on flash drives from my classmates and friends or from the internet shops I visited. Thankfully, despite the many invasions, my anti-virus programs have successfully fended off any badware that has ever managed to touch my computer.

Still, I was puzzled as to how come there are still reports, stories and warnings about the spread of new destructive viruses via email all over the world? My friends, classmates and teachers were being infected too and even consulted me on what to do once their PCs have been ravaged by badware.

I helped them clean-up their PCs, encouraged them to use the same anti-virus tools and other security apps I use and even repaired the PCs of some of them. Still, they get infections from email attachments.
This prompted me to think deeper into the matter.

Since we were practically using the same set of security apps (AV, firewall and other tools) what else could be considered as a “point-of-vulnerability” or entry on their PCs.

The answer dawned upon me when one of my friends while using my desktop computer asked why Outlook was in such a ‘pristine’ state, he accidentally launched it and the auto-configuration wizard greeted him. I answered, “What is Outlook for anyways?”

Yes, though I’m geek and a blogger, back then I have no idea what Outlook was for. Going back, the conversation went on like this (I’ve already translated it into English and restored it from my half-life memory)

James: You don’t know what Outlook is for? It’s an e-mail client.

Me: What’s an email client?

James: WTF? You’re a geek and you don’t know what an email client is?

Me: Dude, I’m a geek but I did not invent the internet, email or an email client.

James: It’s a program that handles your email for you. With it you don’t have to be online all the time to read and reply to email.

Me: Sounds cool. But why use an email client when I could access my email using a web browser?

James: But you need to be online to do so.

Me: But isn’t that how email works? You need the internet to do email.

James: Not with an email client. Like Outlook, it downloads all you email on your computer so that you can read it even when you’re not connected to the internet. When you make replies to email, it saves it so that when you do get back online it then those replies are sent.

Me: I see. That is neat. But wait, when you say it downloads all your email on your computer does that mean the attachments are included?

James: Of course, what good is an email client if attachments wouldn’t be downloaded as well.

Me: Aha! That’s it!

—–

And that is the “point-of-entry” I’ve been looking for. That’s the explanation why warnings about opening email attachments still prevail to this day. That’s the reason my PCs have never been infected from an email attachment. All this time I’ve been accessing my email directly on the internet where my email providers (Hotmail and then Gmail) were scanning the attachments for me. My ignorance of email clients have been saving me from viruses, worms, trojans and other badware that is the scourge of using computers since time immemorial.

I’ve recently installed Mozilla Thunderbird on my notebook, just to try it out. After a few days, I was back to using Gmail on the web browser. It’s so much better and safer.

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It’s been almost two years since that fateful string of events that has led me to curse and hate Globelines broadband and label it a crappy internet service.

Since then, many other unhappy, frustrated and infuriated Globelines broadband customers have been flocked to that post and have shared their own grim stories of how crappy Globelines broadband is according to their experience. Just check out the post and read the many comments that have been added over the years.

However, since about 1 1/2 years ago, my Globelines broadband service has been good. The connection has been stable, fast and virtually no loss of connections in that span of time. Lucky for me right? Well not for the others who, like before me, have had the worst of it. Some had even reached the end of their rope and decided to end their misery once and for all, by terminating their Globelines broadband service.

How do you do this? Simply write a letter to Globelines stating your request for the termination of your land line and internet connection and the reasons why you wish so. To help you in making such a letter, Udaysexy,, who is a former Globelines broadband customer who has had enough of their crappy services has shared a letter she composed requesting that Globelines terminate her internet and land line service, finally ending her misery.

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To: Globe

From: uday

Subject: Cancellation of Internet and phone service

Dear Globe,

Please be advised that I wish to cancel my account #________ for internet and phone service effective immediately. Globe has failed to provide and maintain a stable internet connection to me and periods of no internet at all have lasted as long as three weeks under the guise of a so-called “System Restoration”.

This kind of “service” is intolerable.

Repeated attempts to resolve this issue with Globe Customer Service agents were not only futile but obviously scripted to make promises Globe has not kept and obviously cannot keep. Your obligation to provide a stable internet connection is a basic element of our contractual agreement and Globe has treated me with only contempt.

Furthermore, I was promised one month of free service as an incentive to activate service with Globe but I did not get it. I still have the leaflet that says if I subscribe from November 2007 until December 2007, I am entitled to avail Globe’s promos, and since I want so bad to have my internet, I subscribed, and I chose the 1 Month Subscription Free over the printer since I am not going to need the printer. And guess what? I got my first bill which has a one-day billing period and when I called Globe Customer Service, she said that that is the supposed 1 Month Subscription Free and its not even free at all! I asked her how could that happen? I was supposed to have my first month subscription free but she said that that is system generated and that there is nothing they can do about it. I was really disappointed. I was attracted to Globe and that 1 Month Subscription Free had a big impact on me because I thought it was true.

Regarding this advertisement, based of the RA7394 or Consumer Act of the Philippines Title III - Protection Against Deceptive, Unfair and Unconscionable Sales Acts or Practices; Chapter 1 Article 48 to 52. I just want to highlight Article 50 Prohibition Against Deceptive Sales Acts or Practices - A deceptive act or practice by a seller or supplier in connection with a consumer transaction violates this Act whether it occurs before, during or after the transaction. An act or practice shall be deemed deceptive whenever the producer, manufacturer, supplier or seller, through concealment, false representation of fraudulent manipulation, induces a consumer to enter into a sales or lease transaction of any consumer product or service.

The total lack of responsive customer service and reliable internet service has caused me to lose my job which was dependant on a reliable and stable internet connection. My patience has come to an end and I will not tolerate any further deceit from Globe. I have received two statements regarding payment of my account through the postal service, it is obvious that you cannot bill people on the internet because your customers would never receive it. Therefore I refuse to pay any payments due and in fact I demand a refund for the 5 months I have had your “Service” because it is defective and completely unreliable. I have since applied for and received good service from another internet provider and I have no intentions of ever being a Globe customer again. Additionally, I cannot and will not recommend Globe to any person I come into contact with.

Sincerely,

uday

———

For those who want to follow the similar step and release your self from the misery of having a crappy internet service from Globe, simply follow the pattern of this letter, write things objectively, clearly, honestly and objectively all based on your experience of using or not being able to use their services. Send this to your nearest Globelines Business center and they’ll take care of everything else.

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