“Sorry, your password is too secure. Please try again with a password no longer than 6 characters, containing lowercase alphabets only.”
I am tired of being told by a website that my password is too long, or contains non-alphanumeric characters which aren’t allowed. I am bewildered that most websites balking at long and complex passwords are financial sites, like bank and credit card sites.
Continue reading ‘Sorry, your password is too strong, says financial sites. Why?!’
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Why do I link to torrents on isoHunt whenever possible? Because isoHunt is the only torrent site with this cool but seldom talked about feature: tracker cross-referencing. The feature was implemented back in 2005 and is still invaluable.
Identical torrents across the web are often tracked by different trackers. Users might submit identical torrents to different sites using different trackers. Some tracker sites inject their own tracker into torrents. isoHunt caches one copy of these identical torrents (with the same hash), and edits the torrent to include every available tracker tracking the torrent. Therefore, when you download a torrent from isoHunt, you get maximum reliability and performance due to the redundant trackers that can pick up the slack even when the primary or original tracker is down or slow.
Remember to use redundant trackers when you create your own torrents too.
And for those who aren’t aware, isoHunt is an awesome meta search engine. It indexes practically every public torrent site on the web, and there’s generally no benefit to using other meta search engines instead of isoHunt. Check out the list of sites indexed by isoHunt. Be sure to shoot Gary an email if you know of sites that are not indexed.
I ran out of adjectives starting with “S” to describe what I believe is the very best password management solution currently available, PasswordMaker. PasswordMaker is an implementation of the on-the-fly site-specific web password hashing system.
How many accounts/passwords do you have? One for your Email? Bank(s)? Credit card(s)? Phone companies? School? Work? Utilities? Google? Yahoo? Facebook? MySpace? Amazon? Ebay? NYTimes? Torrent trackers? That annoying website that made you register just to use the simplest feature? (Oh wait, every website is like that nowadays.) I think you get the point. Even the average, casual Internet user can easily have dozens of accounts/passwords. In this day and age, computerized password management systems are absolutely necessary for even casual Internet users, and PasswordMaker is the king of password management.
Continue reading ‘PasswordMaker: safe, secure, simple, site-specific, smart password management’
Ever wanted to edit the trackers in a torrent, share the modified torrent without breaking compatibility with the unmodified torrent? Maybe the torrent is using a dead or dying tracker. Maybe you just want to add more backup trackers to a torrent with only one tracker. You’ll be glad to know that you can do just that.
Editing the trackers in a torrent file does not change the info hash of the torrent. Trackers rely on this info hash to figure out when users are requesting files from the same torrent. If the info hash changes, then trackers and clients will treat the torrent as different from the unmodified torrent, and the tracker will no longer share the seeds and peers using the unmodified torrent, even if the files being shared are identical.
The easiest way I’ve found to edit a torrent file is actually a slick online tool, Torrent Editor. It is, of course, labeled “beta” as all web applications nowadays are (when did the meaning of “beta” change from incomplete, unpolished, buggy, to hot and cool?), but I haven’t encountered any bugs. You simply upload the torrent you want to edit, add/remove the trackers using the online forms, then save and download the modified torrent. It’s all quite self-explanatory.
Note: I originally began researching convenient ways of editing torrents to see if I could edit the “private” aka “DHT” flag of torrents to convert torrents uploaded on private trackers into public ones. It turns out I cannot. 
Changing the private flag changes the info hash.
