I was looking around the internet and spotted a few articles on how to download videos from www.youtube.com .  But none of them seemed to be easier than the way I will describe below.

1. Find the youtube video you wish to download

2. Copy the URL of the page the video is located at e.g.   http://youtube.com/watch?v=J7JmsMMIR4Y

3. Go to http://vixy.net/ and paste the URL at the input box at the top and click “Start”

You would ask your self why you would need to download the videos from youtube if they are already there.   Well the first and most important reason is that a lot of service providers (or university networks such as the one in the University of Kent) impose restrictions on the speeds you can connect to youtube.  The second reason is that you might want to save them for your own personal collection.

You may also ask your self why you should not prefer another webpage such as www.kissyoutube.com .   The reason is that www.vixy.net will convert your video into AVI format and not in an FLV format such as most other pages do.   It also gives you other choices for compression and formats (MOV, MP4, 3GP, MP3 for audio only) in case there is one that suits you better

This will save you the time of converting it the FLV format or downloading an FLV player.   If you do want to get the video in FLV format, for reasons that are beyond me, then remember to download a player from http://www.download.com/FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-10467081.html

Enjoy!!!

According to the statistics posted here Firefox is becoming more and more popular in Europe with 24.1% of the browser “market”. Slovenia at 44.5% and with Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) are leading the way as the countries with the highest percentages. � If you are not already using Firefox why not give it a try. � Its overall safety along with its extensibility and functionality offered by the available plug-ins out there make it hard to resist! �

Simply go to www.mozilla.com/firefox/ and give it a try:)

Take a look at the link here and the website it self if you are a fun of apple. I also wrote the following comment there:

Is this another case of microsoft’s xbox suddenly being able to run things like the xbox media center, and pretty much running like anything from a media center to a computer for browsing the internet et cetera? (in that case ofcourse information was accidentally released from microsoft it self….) That pretty much helped sell a lot of microsoft’s consoles which would have stayed on shelves for a long time (unlike sony’s consoles). I think apple isnt going to shut these guys down, it wont aprove of them but it will simply benefit from the fact that many people will run out to buy their tv boxes and trying to run os x on it et cetera. It wont do wonders as it comes with 256 MB of ram and a 1 ghz processor from what the guys said.

Everyone here is a winner, apple sells more boxes, gets its products into more and more homes, home users get to play around with a gadget that is not a replacment for a mac, but probably runs mac os on it anyway giving a taste of the operating system for users on a more day-to-day basis. And i guess if it is based on intel’s processors and on the i86 platform it might even run windows or any other operating system if one wanted to do that.

It seems like everyone is a winner here, and apple the biggest. Well done guys!

P.S. nice work with the wordpress modified theme

A couple of weeks ago i was about to post an article on my blog to make people aware of a possible security flaw in the gmail service. I then decided to let google know first before lettig anyone else know. It seemed ethical and right behaviour.

The following is what i intended to write

Has anyone noticed that you can be connected to googlemail either securely(over SSL / https ) or unsecurely (unencrypted http connecction)? Although the login pages them selfes are viewed over a secure ssl connection, once you are logged in to gmail, the connection redirects you back to an unsecure connection. You can manually change that by typing https:// google url here but not many people will notice or do that. Anyone with a network sniffer can see pages of your emails etc. There doesnt seem to be anyway of letting google know about this issue as there is no place where people can send feedback

After posting my email – request to google at 2 different feedback points, neither of which was to be used for technical feedback regarding problems with their service, but questions about things such as why people cant log in to their accounts(useful) or saying how great googlemail is (yeah.. right…). No feedback point exists for posting technical feedback regarding their service (overconfident arent they?? ). After waitting for a few days, i got a generic email reply letting me know my account was suspended due to security reasons. At that point i was furius! Trying to help them improve their service so that they can suspend my account? I couldnt believe it.

I calmed down and replied asking why my account was suspended as i was not in violation of the user agreement i agreed to when signing up for google (not using google for sharing illegal files et cetera) . After waitting for a few days and forgeting about it, i got an email 2 days ago basically giving me instructions on how to reset my password (can you believe this?) and telling me the following:

Also, regarding your first message, please note that because we are
testing Google Mail, there is some information we are unable to share. To
read more details about Google Mail, please visit:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html.

Indeed i have to agree with them. Google mail is still in beta, offers no guarantees of its service nor of the confidetiality, integrity and availability of our data. How many of us realise this though? Everyone is switching from microsoft’s email service to google’s one simply because it offers more space (in theory, i think they also dropped the 40 Gig space thing and just state how much space they “really” offer now, with some increase every day). Gmail does offer a simpler user interface, but does it offer enough for us to switch from using another email provider out there for our day to day emailing needs to go to gmail? I for one use microsoft’s hotmail service. It is not the greatest, it doesnt provide me with the assurance of confidentiality, as i dont have much trust over microsoft as a company, but it has proven to be reliable for my every day needs, including offering me with a secure connection to their end without expecting me to switch from one protocol to the other manually.

Isnt Google, the company of the future realising that this is simply a blow to its image? atleast to me. The idea of people being able to view the emails i am looking at, just by running a network sniffer on the network I am at, and not only, is not so nice. The solution to this issue is a very trivial one, all they have to do is redirect the traffic it self over https not only during the login page but through out the session, to allow the encrypted communication channel between us and google to be present.

Is this done so that google’s server load is not as much? SSL connections are resource consuming, i agree, but does google have that much of a problem that it is worried about its computing resources?? are they running low on cash? or are beta projects not that well funded?? OR is google monitoring traffic that comes and goes between us and its servers and having non encrypted connections makes it easier for them, and for other “organizations” to do so. (atleast if microsoft does it, it does it more discreatly). I guess this brings up the issue of being careful of what we save on gmail. After this i doubt there is much privacy offered by google’s services, or atleast not more than microsoft’s. Plenty of more to say here but i will leave it up to that. If you want me to post copies of the email correspondance feel free to ask me. Forgive my spelling mistakes

I was reading an erticle posted on Wired.com about how a court in the states justified a Counter-hack on a so called hacker. If you take a look at the article by clicking here you can find out more and i even took some time to write some thoughts i had as well, forgive my spelling and scattered thoughts, i was in a hurry. The reason i paid attention to this was because a court justified a crime because it allowed the arrest of a so called criminal, without even penilizing the vigilante, even with a one cent fine.  I wont take an ethical stand on what is right or wrong as it is not so simple, i will point out thought that universities and other organizations have an obligation to protect the users of their networks both from each other, from university officers and from them selfes.  In this case the university in question, bared no responsibility on the events that occured.

I found this interesting article on how to get Xbox Media Center on your Xbox.� If you are curius take a look here