Internet

[Edit: December, 2015 – Since BitTorrent Sync hit 2.x, I’m no longer using it and I can no longer recommend it.] Too many times, you’ve heard a cloud storage/sync product described as “like Dropbox.” There’s Box, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Bitcasa, SpiderOak, Wuala, Transporter, and I’ve missed a bunch. It doesn’t matter because they’re all pretty bad, and nearly all have the same problem, which is that any data you upload can be decrypted by the provider. [Read More]

My Amazon EC2 discount contract is almost up, and I’ve been playing with Google Compute Engine (GCE). Initial impressions are that it’s faster and costs less money, particularly if you don’t want to pay up-front for EC2 reserved instances. Google’s web console is more modern than Amazon’s, though slightly less sophisticated. Google’s CLI tools are much faster and don’t require Java. Google’s API uses JSON instead of XML. In terms of capabilities, GCE is not as advanced as EC2, but it’s vastly more powerful than Linode, Digital Ocean, and the like. [Read More]

I frequently connect to insecure Wi-Fi networks on my iOS devices and my Mac. Aside from the risk of eavesdropping and malware when connecting to these hotspots, they frequently block access to services, insert advertisements in web pages, or worse. To work around these problems, I’ve tried numerous virtual private network (VPN) services. My experience with most of them has been awful. They tend to connect slowly or not at all, and I frequently can’t access anything on the Internet once the VPN connection is made. [Read More]

I’ve been using a Dropbox public folder and some Apache trickery to share files directly from Dropbox on my own domain at pub.noxon.cc. Dropbox is drag-and-drop file sharing at its finest, and by sharing my files on my own domain instead of on dl.dropboxusercontent.com, my files are accessible to corporate folks who would otherwise find themselves blocked by an over-zealous web filter. Last but not least, if one of my files becomes too popular, Dropbox won’t shut down my account. [Read More]