This tutorial is obsolete and the links were broken. Furthermore there was an iframe embedded here back from the blogger days. The horror. Needless to say, you’re not missing much here.

Ever gone to a message board and said that you were from some distant country like Africa, only to find that the moderators or admins of the site can pinpoint the exact location of your IP address? Have you ever been bombarded with ads, alerts, or anything else from advertisers? They could have your IP and might be sending you those ads through their so called “knowledge”

Do you just want to be a secretive hermit with an IP address that isn’t yours?

Well, you can be.

In a recent study I did on a message board, my methods shown proven to work as I had fooled all the moderators and admins by having a fake IP address (Yeah, I was DetMan). So how could I pull this kind of stunt off, be logged into two accounts at the same time in the same place, on the same message board, posting stuff at the EXACT same time? Very easily, follow these steps below:

1. Get two TYPES of browsers, one will be for normal internet use, while the other will be manipulated to mask your IP address. You can get more if you want, I recommend IE from Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox. There are others.

2. Once you get the browsers, go to StayInvisible and click on the IP test. Go through it and record your IP address – it will be useful for the next step.

3. On that site, go to the list of proxies (view proxies). Go ahead and pick one out that either has anoniminity or high anoniminity. I personally wouldn’t recommend the transparent ones because I have not tested them yet. Choose one that has an IP address very different from the one you have for better results.

4. Once you have chosen the proxy, record it’s IP address and port number. Then head over to your manipulated browser’s preferences/options. If IE, Tools, options, connections, and if running cable/LAN/DSL, choose LAN settings. Otherwise, choose the dialup connection you are going to use to set the proxy settings and click on settings. In the section that says “Proxy Settings,” mark the checkbox and enter the IP address of the proxy. Then, enter the corresponding port number in the next box. Click Apply.

5. Exit the manipulated browser and start it up again. Then go to the StayInvisible website once more and click on the IP test. If you cannot get to some site for some reason or if the proxy is working too slowly for you, go ahead and uncheck the box in the proxy settings and choose another server IP from the list. Otherwise, complete the IP test and see if the IP results match your real IP. If they do, click on the link below the test similar to “I am using a proxy server, why is my real IP still shown” and follow the instructions there.

6. If needed, take the test over again and change settings until your real IP is not shown. If all is successful, well…you’re done then. YAY!

Your other browser should have your real IP address still, so you can use it if you don’t need to hide your real IP address. Yah…

Oh, and to you guys at the TCoA…you should have left me as a moderator.

Next Week: Interview with a bot – Part One

See ya!

Reality Corp.

This article will be all based upon a familiar site, well, for me anyways. FBhosting.net claims to give out free boards, thus the name FB…free boards. It all started when I was searching google for a phpBB board, for free of course. I came up to a site named freeboards.uni.cc. Naturally, I went and took a look. It seemed pretty good, so I had my board set up even though I had an Invision Powered Board which I much preferred over this one.

Then they put up a deal I couldn’t resist on their forums. Of course, it really was fake advertising, since they were offering unlimited space and bandwidth, but being my naive me, I took the offer. For a measly $10 one time fee, I got myself hosted with a free domain name (chanceforums.uni.cc) and it worked out pretty well and nicely for a few months.

Until…

All of a sudden, when I’m loading my site, I get a whole bunch of installxxx toolbars popping up! Someone had managed to put a javascript code heading to b00gle.com or something like that which made these nasty porn popups come flying out of nowhere. The file could not have been hacked because all the settings on it were write protected unless it was the owner, leaving two culprits – me or FBhosting Admins. And yet again I was naive and just removed that file, setting up another one.

Episode Two, I tried getting onto my website…no such luck. It was down…dead down. Later, in about a day, it popped back up. Then again, it went down for a day and popped back up…and this happened over and over again. Then suddenly, my SQL database went down in flames, but luckily I had a backup to feed my forums with. I tried emailing them and they said that their reseller had been acting up and that they were switching servers. Naturally naive again, I helped them pick out a new server and awaited my site to be put back up and in return, they would give me three months of free hosting from one of their packages.

Fat chance. Their site has been down for two weeks now, server or no server, it’s still lousy administration. And I don’t think it’s lousiness or even laziness…I think it’s just plain fraud.

This goes to say that you can never be too careful when it comes to picking your next host. Horror stories come up like this thousands of times a day from millions of hosting sites. Don’t be one of them in both the customer status or the hoster.

Google just invented a new way of email, and that is with an enormous 1gig space and a good search feature so that you never have to throw away email. Well, that’s the good part; the bad part is that they are still in beta.

So google decides to send out invitations to some exclusive people (active bloggers, and others) and they can invite a limited number in as well and yada yada. Read more about it somewhere else.

Anyways, there is literally a craze going on as people are tearing themselves apart to get a gmail account, asking everyone on the internet, spamming, selling their arms, virginity and whatnot on ebay for it…WHAT THE MONKEYS PEOPLE!?!?! The reason to rush? Well the only reason most people give is that the names will all be taken by the time it comes to them. So freakin’ what? Who cares enough to go get an account and pay for it on ebay or spend their precious time clicking refresh over and over again [dead link], asking strangers on the internet (although a much better approach) but they are literally spamming message boards while doing it. CMON PEOPLE, CAN YOU NOT WAIT!?! It’s ridiculous but it’s happening. Watch what happens a few months later when gmail comes out…the craze will vanish instantaneously. Who will care who got a gmail account first…everyone will have one, too. You might be special for a while, but just like with Pokemon or Star Wars or anything else, it’ll just be bland.

Second issue…1gig of space. Hello? Is anybody actually going to use that much space? Yes they will and google is ready for it. But then there are others of us who can’t even fill up our hard drive with that much space (not including the OS itself) so how are we going to deal with 1gig? Never delete a message again, even if it’s spam, get a nice big spam collection.

For those of you still waiting for a gmail for the purpose of 1gig, use SpyMac instead for now, even if you hate macs. They will also give you 100mb of hosting space and 250mb on top of that for a picture gallery.

For those of you waiting to get a unique name for gmail, the names already taken, too bad.

Great skins, styles, and boot screens for WindowsXP

I found this site a few days ago and it’s a pretty nice one. If you have a WindowsXP system, you might want to check it out. What is it exactly? ThemeXP is a site that contains all sorts of skins, wallpaper, boot screens, logon screens, icons, and whatnot to jazz up the look of your computer. With thousands of options to choose from, you will find the perfect style to jazz up your computer with. Don’t like the look of your default screen every time you load the computer? Pick one out from this site, maybe even make it look like another OS! Great site.

Rating: 8/10 – Good organization, easy to find skins and easy to install them. But beware of popups on this site…don’t use IE with this site without getting a popup blocker first.

-RC