The chatter has increased these days with lots of techies and bloggers deciding to sign off facebook in order to protect their privacy. So what happened that changed things suddenly? Why is privacy so important now?
Last month facebook changed their privacy policy yet again. And now they get to share all your information with their partner sites. All one needs is a little HTML code from facebook and I have all your information. Now what could one do with this information?

Remember the Truman Show? That's how your life has become. Everyone in the world can see what you do each day. You live a life for everyone in the world to see, everything you do, every move you make. Every bit of your happiness and sadness is now played out to the world. The information can be easily used to stalk you and build up a huge profiling database. Your every move can be predicted and you end up being directed by your fans and friends. Imagine a life lead for the public decided by the public; that's what happens when you do not have privacy and when you choose to use Facebook's default privacy settings. And that's the reason most of us techies want to get out of facebook. We prefer leading lives and sharing updates with a small group of friends we know and not with their friends of friends or the world.

How can you reclaim your privacy and prevent facebook from making your life a Truman Show...

The most straight forward technique is to just go to facebooks settings dialog box and retrieving every setting to friends only instead of everyone. And then opting out of sites and everything else. There are a total of over 100 options before you can get your privacy back which is harder than deactivating the facebook account and leading a phone based social life.

The second alternative is to make use of automated privacy scanners such as reclaim privacy. These are just javascripts that are run inside a facebook page. The javascripts will look at all the myriad of privacy settings and will tell you where your privacy stands and will also offer to correct it..Try


http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

there are a couple more which you can find by a simple google search; the best thing about these scanners are that they are open source and if they steal data the web will be awash with those stories.

Unless you wish to lead your life in the public's eye and wish to entertain everyone; change your privacy settings to private and lead your life, your way :) You might also want to delete unknown people from your friends lists as they might be there for gathering data to be used for spamming you later....

Automatically turning on and off your computer is something that some of us desire. It is generally useful if you have to download something at a prescribed time interval. 

This is an apocalypse!

Here is how you can increase the view count of your videos on youtube.

I will show you a number of different methods to do this .


1. The scripting way.

 In this method, you wil be using one of the many scripting languages such as PERL , Python , PHP, JAVA to write a piece of code that opens the url to your video again and again and then closes it down.
When this piece of code is put inside a loop, the video site thinks that the video has been video numerous times(actually its equal to the number of times the loop is executed).

Some sample scripts that i found on another blog are as below:

{All the stuff after this line is from the blog icfun}

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Bot to increase myspace video view count. Sample Perl/Python/PHP code

Suppose you have a video at myspace, and now you want to increase the video view count for that video. How to do that? As you know myspace is always using the XML service to handle most of the things. When the browser loaded, that XML service called to increase the view count. Suppose you have uploaded a video linked at http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=2841784. Just extract the video ID. and use the below Perl script to increase the video view count.http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=2841784. Just extract the video ID. and use the below Perl script to increase the video view count.

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I'm giving an example of perl script to increase the video view count. Just put your perl code under a loop according to your desired number.


use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

my $id = 2841784;
my $url = "http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/video.asmx/IncrementVideoPlays?videoID=$id&token=29254735542157_ec2&versionID=1";
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/2006120418 Firefox/2.0.0.1');
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
my $res = $ua->request($req);


Thats it. If you want to add proxy support with your script. Just add this inside your script.


my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $proxy_url = "http://78.29.232.10:8080/";##change your ip and port
$ua->proxy('http', $proxy_url);


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If you don't know perl scripting. Here is the php code to crack. Just use the curl. Use the below code inside your loop to increase the video view count. You can use proxy support with curl. Just check the proxy of your own. If you don't know hot to set proxy with curl. I'll help.


$id = 2841784;
$url = "http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/video.asmx/IncrementVideoPlays?videoID=$id&token=29254735542157_ec2&versionID=1";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); ## return the content into a variable
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11');
$content = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);


Now you don't know curl, or not interested, or not exist with your apache. Then more simpler code. Just use inside your loop to increase the video view count. Only drawback of this is, you can't add any proxy with this function.


$id = 2841784;
$url = "http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/video.asmx/IncrementVideoPlays?videoID=$id&token=29254735542157_ec2&versionID=1";
file_get_contents($url);


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For python lovers, here is the below code to use. Just use the code inside your loop. If you need more help on python, just look at http://love-python.blogspot.com/ This guy is the best in python so his blog. Ask him for more help on python.


import urllib2

id = "2841784";
url = "http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/video.asmx/IncrementVideoPlays?videoID="+id+"&token=29254735542157_ec2&versionID=1";
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
usock = opener.open(url)
url = usock.geturl()
data = usock.read()
usock.close()


Thats it friends, If get compile error or any thing. just kick me, i'll fix for you guys soon of my best.

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{end of stuff from the blog icfun. Whatever follows is my stuff}


That is for scripting.  So all you need to know is to run a script that can in turn fool the servers into believing that there have been numerous users accessing it.
YouTube seems to have learned of this technique and now monitors an ip address. If the same ip generates too many view; it  will not increment the video views.
A work around for this would be to use a proxy to show that the video was accessed from a different location on earth!



2.Without all the scripting and fuss

This is the technique that is easiest to use. There are some enterprising people who have created softwares to increase the numbers of  views of your video on YouTube. All you have to do is to download the software and install it. You can set the number of times your video  has to be viewed. You can also ask it to use a pre-defined proxy list. Simply hit start and lo! the number of views will begin to increase. The name of the software is TubeIncreaser

Here is the link to the software

http://www.tubeincreaser.com

It is a shareware which can be used for 40 minutes for free. This translates to around a 1000 views. The instructions for using the software can be found inside it or on the website above.

The software costs 100$ and it has already been cracked by the pirates.



This more or less summarizes the methods available to increase the number of views of you video