How The Social Credit System Ruins Lives – Real Case Example

The Chinese Social Credit System In Practice

By Dark Politricks

This is a real case example of how the social credit system in China, coming soon to a country you live in, can destroy the life of real people.

In my last article I showed how the Social Credit system in China basically comes down to the point of you choosing your friends or the ability to buy certain goods or travel. Someone with a bad social credit score is considered an outcast, and by just associating with someone with such a score you too could lose points and privileges.

This video below is about fake martial arts and how dangerous and cult like, the belief in them can have on someone. However at the end is a real life case study that you should watch to see how the life of one man has been ruined by his social credit score.

He is not allowed to fly on planes, use high speed rail, his family are abused and he has been fined numerous times. What has he done to earn such behaviour?

Well he is a radio DJ, and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) practitioner and in China where the authorities promote traditional martial arts such as Kung Fu and Tai Chi, to the extent that school children must learn the art to graduate high school, MMA is considered a crude sport.

However the rigid non fighting movements of these traditional martial arts, and grand masters who believe they can beat any MMA fighter using Tai Chi, Kung Fu or even physic abilities where they can apparently knock out an opponent without touching them.

This radio DJ, a forty year old named Xu Xiadong, was a trainer at a martial arts gym for 20 years, even his gym has disowned him, all for accepting the challenges of these Chinese Masters, and basically proving that their psychic powers, Tai Chi and Kung Fu, is not a real fighting tool.

He has had nearly 20 fights with these masters of traditional Chinese martial arts and has an unbeaten record. You can watch him basically destroy all these practitioners but by doing so he has earned himself the disdain of the Chinese government and many Chinese people who believe he is being disrespectful to their traditions.

His family is abused, he has been assaulted in the street and on one occasion he had to travel on an old train system for dozens of hours to get to a fight because just before it the Chinese Authorities had removed his access to high speed rail travel. At the fight he attended the government made him wear Chinese clown makeup and gave him a stupid name which he had to accept to participate.

During this fight with one of China’s most well known masters, he basically knocked him down multiple times in the first round, showing that the “masters” skills were inadequate, and despite the referee diving on top of the master to save him from a pounding, and the numerous times he was knocked to the floor, the fight at the end was considered a draw!

The Chinese master, complained afterwards that his poor performance was due to a lack of rice before the fight. Not unlike some of the no touch masters in the beginning of the video who when sceptics challenge their “no touch knockout” skills and prove they don’t work. They use excuses such as the persons tongue was on one side of their mouth, or one toe was raised, both causing an unbalance where the no touch punch cannot work.

However this is not about fighting, this is about how the authorities can destroy a persons life using the social credit system. This all encompassing system that controls the lives of over a billion people has destroyed this persons life all due to his preferred style of martial arts.

You may think that a system like this will never come to your own country but China has been used as a test-bed for such systems of controlling the population since Mao’s great leap forward.

Despite 60+ million people dying under the rule of Mao, this change was praised by western leaders and they have been using China to test out Internet firewalls, used by Australia, and other western countries, and other methods of control such as the use of digital money replacing cash, something the Scandinavian nations want to achieve very soon.

In Sweden for example, Church goers text donations to their churches and homeless people carry mobile credit-card readers, all due to the lack of physical cash in the country.

Therefore do not believe that these types of systems cannot appear in Western nations.

The US and UK already has enough CCTV cameras and programs such as TRAPWIRE to link the images together to track people’s behaviour, anticipate violent or unsocial actions, and have been using these systems for at least 8 years.

Just imagine the leap forward they could have managed in the last 8 years and when you read articles about how easy it is to pay for goods on your phone or debit card, remember that the authorities would love there to be no cash.

Just imagine all the instant fines they could take money from your accounts for speeding, or anti social behaviour.

If you don’t like Martial Arts, or want to watch the whole video just scroll the timer to 19 minutes 21 seconds, to watch the part about how Xu Xiadong’s life has been ruined by the Chinese Social Credit System.

View the article on the main site and use the new (banned #altnews site search engine at the top of the page), here.

By Dark Politricks

© 2020 Dark Politricks

After the shutting down of Silk Road who will pop up to take it’s place?

After the shutting down of Silk Road who will pop up to take it’s place?

By Dark Politricks

Recently we have had the shut down of the online darknet Silk Road website.

Apparently the man behind it, Ross Ulbricht, was found with bitcoins worth $3.6m (£2.2m) when the FBI raided him.

What we need is a proper “DarkNet search engine”.

The problem is once it was created everyone would be on it and it wouldn’t be dark anymore.

However a program, downloaded to the users computer like P2P software, that crawled behind the scenes to find “dark” sites from links on certain messageboards and other “known dark site” locations could be made instead.

Just like the NSA and their own super Google, we need a way to quickly make a local search engine on the users PC of encrypted files that when ran locally acted like a search engine.

No public domain, no WHOIS records, just a way to obtain the software and  download it to your PC and run it locally.

The website would be local to your PC so no log files and just return sites from a local search engine – your own personal naughty Google.

Obviously you would use TOR like software or proxies to make all HTTP requests – but then you would be doing that anyway if you had half a brain. Maybe you would need to prove yourself first before downloading it – maybe after a criminal record check to ensure you ARE a criminal!

Maybe I might just build my own one for a test and see how it goes. I did manage to make a similar piece of software called Proxy Hunter that goes off and finds proxies from any website, decodes the source using various methods, tests and then stores the Proxies on demand for use if required. Works a charm.

This could be a good programming challenge! Who will take it up!

Remember people.

Crawling the web is NOT illegal, sending drugs over state or country borders is!

Whether drugs should be legalised altogether is another question!

However what I cannot believe is why the doofus behind the site used an email address with his name in it?

Had he never heard of disposable email addresses?

All it seems to take is one mistake by an idiot criminal not thinking ahead far enough and then a few years later – bang – 6 o’clock knock by the old bill (or FBI in his case).

Lets see what pops up in it’s place.

Just like a drugs gang, when one gets shut down, ten new ones open in their place.

If any of you have any links, messaboards that point to such links, or known front ends to such dark sites, then please forward them (email or comment) on so I can help write this crawler.

It will be an interesting challenge but obviously I don’t want to crawl google but instead know hubs and maybe “submitted” links. Proxy front ends for Pirate Bay, new Silk Roads, alternative news sites that appear no-where in Google and other sites that would be of “interest” to certain people.

 

View the original article After the shutting down of Silk Road who will pop up to take it’s place? at darkpolitricks.com

Escaping from ECHELON

Escaping from ECHELON

By Dark Politricks

How funny is it that Edward Snowden has released information that shows the outcries of European nations to be false, hypocritical and superficial at the very least.

It has been known for over a decade that the main western nations including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and to a lesser extent Germany and other Euro nations were engaged in massive data collection through the ECHELON system.

I remember reading about it back when I had just left school. Trying all the online tests to “prove” that emails were being re-routed by keyword analysis.

I remember one such test involved sending two emails. The first with known flagged keywords such as bomb or AK47 and then another without. The first email was supposed to arrive in your other inbox after the second one due to it having been re-routed and checked by the ECHELON system. Checking timestamps on spoofed emails mentioning bombs and guns was a fun way to spend an afternoon at school.

Anyone who knows about ECHELON knows that the idea was that countries would spy on each other and then share the data to bypass laws preventing the countries snooping on their own citizens. However that all seems to have changed since 9.11. Now they just hoover up the data and our politicians claim it’s for our own safety and that “sufficient oversight” exists to prevent mis-use of the technology.

Yes and I believe everything our Home or Foreign Secretary says….

Apparently in this free for all, data grabbing world, real sim cities are being built by the NSA/GCHQ nexus. It seems they are trying to replicate a whole world on their super computers so that they can monitor our behaviour and spot when someone acts outside their “natural boundaries”. This could be shopping at a different store than usual, driving a new route to work or speaking to different people on or offline.

All our data is combined, merged and analysed. The lines between private and state data monitoring no longer exist.

Those Tesco points you have been earning are most likely filling up just one section of your own virtual profile at GCHQ – don’t dare to go on a diet suddenly, they might think you are acting “strangely” and upgrade your monitoring status a few grades!

As attested to by cryptome.org in a recent article they are literally creating computer models where each human being is a “node” to be measured and monitored.

By combining all the various pieces of private, public and stolen data from the cables that take all the telecom communications under the Atlantic from the UK to the USA, the NSA & GCHQ can literally virtualise our lives and then run models to predict what would happen in certain scenarios.

What would be the normal behaviour of society if the water or electricity was cut off for 3 days?

Who would be likely to riot or take to the Internet and demand changes?

What groups of people are more likely to complain about their situation when taxes are increased than others?

What quantity of benefits and state handouts does it take to produce a dumbed down nation of uninquisitive fools?

What about a terrorist attack or police shooting?

Will the neighbourhood you live in be compliant and lock the doors as they did in Boston or would a single shooting of a known drug dealer in LONDON cause massive riots around the country?

It is getting to the stage that your actions can be accurately predicted and any variation from the norm is automatically noticed, flagged and probably checked for signs of malcontent.

Just as they know I have time to write a couple of articles for this blog a week, drive a certain way to work, shop at local stores and like the odd flutter on the horses they would know the same about you without having to do too much data analysis. Give me enough data points and a big enough database and I could probably write a half decent programme to do the same.

I can only imagine the tools available to the GCHQ coders.

Plus it doesn’t really help our cause when we are so keen to hand over our data to known intelligence agency linked companies such as Microsoft or Google. Got a Facebook page? Comments and quotes all logged and flagged. Mentioned anything about the government lately? Maybe you are already halfway towards getting your name onto a watch-list. Visited anyone in Pakistan lately? Your probably on at least a few already!

When Google analyses your email contents and search terms to show “appropriate” advertising just think what the NSA and GCHQ are analysing with their super computers. They don’t want to show you adverts, that’s for sure.

So whilst some of us have known about ECHELON for decades, to some the revelations coming from Snowden are a shock. However what we actually know is guaranteed to be only the tip of a humongous iceberg, the tip of which is scary enough, but we probably can’t even comprehend what is below the water line!

I am just waiting for the first properly real virtual world computer games.

Ones which people will flock to, thinking they can escape the drudgery of work and the meaningless lives they have.

Terrorists will probably meet up in virtual worlds just to chat, thinking they will escape real world monitoring.

It is only a matter of time until a true “Second Life” is produced.

One in which people can touch, taste and pretend they are something when their real life is nothing.

It might sound like fun, even idealistic.

The problem is, that when that day comes, you can safely assume that the NSA/GCHQ nexus will already have virtual informants to monitor your virtual life.

Escape? I don’t think we ever will.

 

View the original article on my main site www.darkpolitricks.com, its called Escape from ECHELON.

Apple iPad spanked with Defective by Design protest

Rik Myslewski
The Register
27th January 2010

“You are now entering an Apple restricted zone”

Not everyone is drooling about Apple’s soon-to-be-launched tablet. Members of the anti-DRM group Defective by Design were protesting Wednesday morning outside Apple’s tighty controlled launch event, handing out cards mocking Apple’s invitation, with Apple’s tagline “Come see our latest creation” replaced with “Come see our latest restriction.”

“There has been much speculation about what Apple will be announcing, with most of it revolving around a possible tablet PC — basically an oversized iPhone,” reads a statement from the group. “But no matter the form factor, it’s all but certain given the direction Apple has been going that any new product will be DRM-infected and restricted by proprietary software.”

In addition to the group’s mock invitation, handed out to media member’s queueing up to watch the unveiling of the Apple tablet, two Defective by Design members were displaying large placards entitled “Entering Apple Restriction Zone,” said to be provided by the “Apple Security Administration.”

Check your computer’s freedom at the door

As we said in our recent article, “Welcome to the out-of-control decade,” there’s much to be concerned about as Apple and others lock down your computing devices.”

Good on ya’, DBD. ®

View the original article at the Register

Create Your Own Web Proxy Server

By Dark Politricks

If you have read my blog lately you will have seen a number of articles about the Internet and the loss of privacy and freedom that is being rapidly expanded by big brother and which will eventually turn the net into nothing more than a network for advertisers and a way for a government and big corporates to keep track of you.

If the powers that be succeed in removing or limiting the things that make people use the web in the first place then business will suffer as you will have a large network of sellers with no-one around to buy. It reminds me of a Twitter bot I came across the other day that was just retweeting other peoples messages by following certain hash tags. Looking at its profile you could see that it was following thousands of people and had thousands of followers itself a cursory check showed a funny case of Bots following Bots.

In fact the majority of all Internet traffic is bot traffic, search engine crawlers, content scrapers, RSS feed aggregators and so on. I reckon that the actual true percentage of web requests carried out by real humans at the end of a keyboard is actually less than 10%. This 10% are mostly made up of people social networking, downloading movies and music and most of all watching porn. These are you average Internet users and in all 3 areas porn, music and social networks they are being spied on for signs of copyright infringement, illegal activity e.g pedophilia, and the security networks have admitted scanning social networks for signs of malcontent by possible terrorists or subversionists.

Therefore Internet privacy is a major issue and has driven numerous people into the arms of proxy servers, web proxies, darknets and the like and not just because they have something to hide. One of the major issues with the huge number of web proxies that have sprung up over the last few years is that they are run by hackers who are hoping you are stupid enough to use them to pass important data across such as logons and passwords or even bank details.

If you are not using a secure proxy then any information you pass through it will be available to the proxy server especially because most proxies only handle GET requests which means the data is visible not only in the address bar but also the log file on the web server. You can log POSTS but it takes a bit of work and the log files would be huge.

A recent Radio One interview with school children who were using web proxies to surf Facebook all day whilst they were supposed to be doing school work revealed a very worrying attitude to safety regarding proxies and didn’t seem to care that their logons were being passed into the hands of people who would use them for phishing and other scams.

If like me you are interested in computers and hacking (not the illegal sense) then its not too hard to create your own web proxy. This could be hosted in a country that you wanted to be able to access e.g the USA so that you could access content banned by IP or it could be hosted on your own server so that at work or school if you wanted to view a site on a blacklist you could by accessing the content through the proxy. In fact there are many reasons for creating your own simple proxy and for that reason I have created an example that you can download the code for and use if you so wished.

The web proxy is pretty simple but has the following features:

• Written in PHP, a popular scripting language.
• The code is all in one page with comments and debug statements that can be switched on or off.
• It offers you the ability to choose a different user-agent IE 7 or FireFox 3 or keep your existing one.
• Once the content has been retrieved it parses the content and changed any links inside the HTML so that they are also re-routed through the proxy. Therefore you only need to use the initial search page to view your first page.
• It contains a built in white-list of allowed domains which can easily be turned into a blacklist. If you allow other people to use it then you can control which domains they can or cannot view.

Anyone who is checking your outbound Internet traffic will most likely be blocking certain sites such as YouTube, Facebook and so on especially if you are at school or work. Therefore you could locate this page on a domain that is not blocked either by purchasing a hosting package or by turning your home computer into a server see this or this. Then instead of accessing the blocked sites directly you can go to your own web proxy and access them that way.

The benefit of using your own web proxy over those on the web are:

• You know it’s secure as you control the code so no worries about hackers inserting malicious scripts into the source code or scanning your request for personal details.
• You can control who uses it. You could put it at a location only you know about or add a simple password check to prevent unauthorised access.
• You can expand the code to add further features and its a good way of getting into computer programming!

I have put an example of my web proxy up here where you can see it work in action. Do not think you can use this as a proxy for all sites though as I have limited the domains you can access to a very small number for example purposes only to show how easy it would be to set-up a web proxy for yourself.

This is just something I have knocked up very quickly so please don’t complain about the code or functionality. It has been done to show how easy it would be to create your own example and any proper programmers out there would know how to do this anyway. For those of you who wish to use the code which can be downloaded here. I would recommend doing the following tweaks.

• Modify the Crawler Method mycrawler_single so that it handles POST’s as well as GET’s.
• Modify the Crawler Method mycrawler_single so that it can make requests through a proxy server itself. Tunneling will slow down content retrieval but will also make it more secure as long as you trust the proxy it’s going through.
• Add more user-agents to the list of choices.
• Modify the regular expressions that change the URLs so that they are scrambled in a certain way e.g by shifting the characters a couple to the left or using a hash function. You can then unscramble in the crawler method. This would prevent firewalls that scan for web addresses as parameters in other URLs as well as the main URL.
• The function reformat_links currently reformats all src and href attributes so that they pass through the proxy. The code currently handles absolute and relative links but not formats such as ..\.\ I don’t like this format of referencing resources which is why I didn’t bother handling them. If you want to update this function then you can.
• Reformat the code e.g put the code into a class, separate out the HTML and CSS etc. Its all in one file at the moment which makes it simple and easy to set up. Feel free to modify it.
• Once you are happy with the code you should remove or comment out all calls to the ShowDebug function. Even when $DEBUG = False which prevents debug messages from showing its still an overhead to make these unnecessary function calls.

You can download the web proxy source code here: www.darkpolitricks.com/downloads/webproxy.zip

You can view the example web proxy page in action here: www.darkpolitricks.com/webproxy.php

Please read some more of my articles on Internet Privacy, How to avoid being logged and how to increase the performance of your computer and browser.

Are the days of Internet freedom coming to an end

Internet censorship and surfing anonymously

FireFox Performance Tweaks to boost your browsers speed

A how to guide to increase the speed and performance of your computer

Avoid Google spying on you as you use their search engine

Performance Tweaks For FireFox

Firefox Tweaks for increased Speed and Performance

This article has been written specifically about improving the performance of the FireFox browser. If you are having problems regarding performance in general then I would suggest looking into other areas first before tweaking your browser settings.

I have written a specific article about performance tuning your PC, Network and Browser here: http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2009/12/performance-tuning-your-computer-and-network-connection which will take you through all the steps required to diagnose and resolve performance issues related to your computer or network.

For those of you who just want a very simple fast performing safe and secure browser to use to surf the net then I would suggest using Google Chrome.

The following guide should only be attempted by those people who are comfortable with changing core application settings. For those people who want to increase browser performance without fiddling about with the configuration I would recommend the following:

-Use the free to download application FireTune which will modify some of the same settings that I am going to list automatically.

-Use the TuneUp Utilities Application which will modify some FireFox settings as well as numerous other settings related to Browser performance, TCP/IP settings, Disk space, registry, un-used programs, CPU and Memory management and numerous other performance tweaks.

Otherwise go to about:config in the address bar of FireFox and enter the “here be dragons” section.

Most of these options will already exist but if they don’t you can add them to the config by right clicking, selecting New (boolean, string, integer) adding the the correct name and then the correct value. Obviously if the value is a number you choose integer and if its true or false boolean otherwise its a string.

Before doing any changes you should make a backup either manually by writing down current settings or using FireTune to do a backup or just copy the current settings from C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\pref. Obviously if you saved your version of Firefox somewhere other than Program Files then you should look there.

Do a page load speed test before and after any changes from www.numion.com/stopwatch to see if the changes have made any difference always making sure that the browser cache is cleared before each test to make the comparisons fair.

To find out what each tweak does just append the full name to this URL

kb.mozillazine.org

e.g

kb.mozillazine.org/network.http.max-connections

network.http.max-connections = 30

network.http.max-connections-per-server = 15

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy = 24

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 8

network.http.pipelining true

network.http.proxy.pipelining true

network.http.pipelining.firstrequest false

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8

network.http.request.max-start-delay 0

network.prefetch-next false

network.ftp.idleConnectionTimeout 300

network.http.keep-alive.timeout 30

browser.history_expire_days_min 10

browser.cache.memory.enable true

The following option depends on your RAM

• For RAM over 2GB I use 65536
• For RAM sizes between 512MB and 1GB, start with 15000.
• For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000

The following article will list out the default values for this option.

kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

browser.cache.memory.capacity = 65536 (see above for details)

content.interrupt.parsing[boolean] true

content.switch.threshold[integer]=650000

content.max.tokenizing.time[integer]=3000000

content.maxtextrun[integer]=8191

content.notify.backoffcount[integer]=200

content.notify.interval[integer]=100000

content.notify.ontimer=true

content.notify.threshold[integer]=100000

network.dnsCacheEntries [integer] 255

network.dnsCacheExpiration [integer] 86400

config.trim_on_minimize[boolean] true

nglayout.initialpaint.delay[integer] 100

This setting will disable 3rd party cookies from being saved. The possible values are 0 which accepts all cookies, 1 only accept cookies from the same server and 2 disable all cookies. Set it to 1 to block 3rd party cookies.

network.cookie.cookieBehavior 1

Optional – May increase performance but will also reduce usability so choose carefully

Limits the maximum number of pages stored in memory in such a way that they don’t have to be re-parsed when pressing Back and Forward. If you, like me, are not using the Back and Forward buttons that much but rather tabs then I see no reason for Firefox to keep a lot of memory with this.

browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers change to 1 (default: -1)

Disable Extension Compatibility Checks so that each time you load Firefox it doesn’t check for new versions of your extensions. You must remember to do this manually from time to time if they stop working though!

extensions.checkCompatibility = False

extensions.checkUpdateSecurity = False

Stop Displaying Website Icon (Favicon) in Address bar & On Tab

browser.chrome.site_icons = False

Cool tweaks – Non Performance related

layout.spellcheckDefault 2 – extend spellcheck to form elements inputs as well as textareas

browser.blink_allowed = false – ‘disable blinking text from <blink>

browser.search.openintab true – opens any search results from the search bar in a new tab instead of overwriting existing one

Open View Source in your favourite editor e.g Editplus

view_source.editor.external=True

view_source.editor.path= Path of Editor e.g C:\Program Files\EditPlus 2\editplus.exe

You also often have a lot of tabs open? This setting will decrease the minimum width of the tab so that more fits in before you need to scroll to see more tabs.

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth change to 70

To Enable Single Click Select URL of address bar use the below about:config Tweak

browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll = True

To disable Single Click Select

browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll = False

Auto Complete URL while You type at address Bar

browser.urlbar.autoFill true

This is a good hack to trim down that huge auto-complete list on your URL bar. By default it displays maximum 12 URL

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults (pick a number from 1 to 12)

Performance Tuning your Computer and Network Connection

How to performance tune your Computer and Internet Connection

I recently had major issues with performance on my laptop and an intermittent slowdown which meant that I couldn’t watch streamed movies (e.g YouTube) or remotely access my office computer due to the slow internet connection. Certain times of the day it was fine but at night it was generally bad. This article is based on the steps that I used to diagnose and overcome the problem. It can also be used by those of you who just wish to get the best performance out of your computers.

Is the problem related to your Internet speed or overall computer performance?

Are you only experiencing problems when you are on the Internet such as slow loading web pages, stuttering video streaming or videos just not playing. Or are you having problems running desktop applications such as programs that are slow to open or files that are slow to save. Is just navigating your PC a task in itself or are you experiencing popups all the time that you don’t recognise asking you “To run performance checks“, “Install this Spyware checker” or pages filled with adverts or links to advertisements that you don’t know where they have come from?

Computer Related Problems

First thing is to ensure you don’t have a virus, Trojan or Spyware on your PC.

• If you use Internet Explorer to surf the Internet then there is a good chance you might have a virus as this browser is well known for its many security holes. Consider changing your browser to either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is a very fast browser and Firefox is a favourite of developers due to the huge number of add-ons available for it.
• If you use a PC Make sure you install any Windows updates as they reguarly contain patches for security vulnerabilities.
• If you don’t have a virus / spyware checker installed then download one of the good free ones e.g Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Spybot Search and destroy, Ad-Aware or even better download multiple applications as its not uncommon for one app to find items that another one will not. Remember to always update the virus definitions before running it.
• If your virus software doesn’t find a virus it doesn’t mean you don’t have one it could just mean that its either a new virus that definitions haven’t been created for or its already managed to take hold of your PC and block any virus checker from finding it. Try running a program such as Trend Micro’s HijackThis which checks for suspicious looking processes and activity on your PC rather than looking for known virus definitions. If you are unsure about a flagged item you should send the outputted report to one of the recommend forums where specialists will analyse the report and give you detailed info on any action required such as running the Trojan removal tool SDFix.exe.

Once spyware and viruses have been ruled out you should run some basic maintenance on your computer which can be done manually or by downloading one of the many optimiser tools that are available on the net. I have investigated many of these tools and by far the best one I have found is TuneUp Utilities which offers all the tools you need to clean and speed up your PC and browser with a very easy to use interface.

It offers the ability to modify computer and browser settings to speed up your browsing, remove un-used programs, clean up and defrag your hard-drive and registry, speed up your PC by disabling a number of memory and CPU intensive operations that offer little benefit and much more. There is also a “One Click Optimiser” button which checks your system and offers the solutions. If you want to save a lot of time downloading numerous tool or doing it all by hand then this is the tool for you.

Tuning up your PC Manually

• Defrag your hard-drive. Over time your disk will get fragmented as new files are added and existing ones are edited or deleted. A heavily fragmented drive slows down file retrieval and saving. You can do this through the Accessories > System Tools > Disk Fragmenter option or you can download a tool like Defraggler to do this for you.
• Remove old programs and shortcuts to those programs if you never use them any-more. You can use the Add-Remove programs option from the Control Panel to do this or download a program like CCleaner which offers a number of options to help clean up your computer.
• Remove anything from your startup menu that you hardly use or don’t require to be running when you start-up your computer.
• Clean up your Registry. Often when files are installed or deleted keys are left in the registry that are no longer required. Like any database the more useless information it contains the slower the retrieval of useful info becomes. A tool like TuneUp Utilities or CCleaner offers you the ability to do this easily without having to trawl through the registry looking for keys by hand.
• Disable memory and CPU intensive operations that run in the background when you require optimal performance. For example disk defragmentation or a full virus scan will slow down your PC when running. This is one of the good things about TuneUp Utilities Turbo Mode as it can be set on or off when required and will ensure that any CPU or Memory intensive operations can be disabled when you require optimal performance.
• Configure the advanced settings in Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance.
  1. Under the Visual Effects tab you should set the option to “Adjust for best performance”.
  2. On the Advanced tab you should ensure Processor Scheduling and Memory Usage is set to Programs
  3. For Virtual Memory make sure both the initial and maximum size are set the same which according to Microsoft its recommended that this should be 1.5 times your system memory.
  4. Under the Data Execution Prevention tab you should set to“turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select”
• Clean up your temporary browser files. Make sure your cache and Internet history doesn’t get too large so clean all temporary Internet files on a regular basis. The cache is great for helping sites you regularly visit load quickly but the larger it gets the slower page loads get for all sites.
• Remove any add-ons that you never use anymore. In Firefox the more add-ons you have the slower the browser can be when loading and they can even cause errors. You will often have duplicate add-ons e.g different versions of Java which can be removed.
• Install Advert and Flash blocker add-ons if your browser supports it (Firefox, Chrome). Without having to load Flash files and other adverts the page load times can be increased dramatically.
• Disable JavaScript by default. Not only do most web delivered viruses use JavaScript to infect new PC’s it can slow down page load times and make pages seem unresponsive during certain events e.g window, DOM load. All browsers will let you disable JavaScript and in IE VBScript from their inbuilt Options. However to make it easier to set which sites have it on and off you can install add-ons such as NoScript or the Web Developer toolbar. A lot of sites use JavaScript to display adverts, load flash or other videos, validate form fields and deliver other forms of content. Therefore you may find that by having JavaScript disabled you have reduced functionality on many sites. However pages should load a lot quicker and if you do trust the site or require the missing functionality you can always re-enable it.
• Disable 3rd party cookies. These are cookies that are not set by the site you are visiting and are usually used by advertisers for tracking the sites you visit so that they can deliver more targeted advertisiments. Even Google uses these kinds of cookies now and many people consider them an invasion of their privacy which is why most Spyware tools identify them as items to be removed. This is how to disable 3rd party cookies in the top 3 browsers.
  1. Chrome you can do this by going to Tools > Options > Under The Hood > Privacy > Cookie Settings > Accept cookies only from sites I visit.
  2. Internet Explorer go to Tools > Internet Options > Privacy and then set your Privacy level to Medium high which will disable most 3rd party cookies and some 1st party ones. This will still allow you to login to sites but should prevent all the tracker and advert cookies that accumulate as you surf the net.
  3. Firefox removed the option to block 3rd party cookies in version 2 saying it was impossible to accomplish however you can still do this by either installing an add-on called CookieSafe or changing your user preferences by entering about:config in the address bar and then searching for network.cookie.cookieBehavior. The possible values are 0 which accepts all cookies, 1 only accept cookies from the same server and 2 disable all cookies. Set it to 1 to block 3rd party cookies.
• Enable Popup blockers and disable any un-used toolbars e.g Google, Yahoo etc.
• In FireFox disable Firebug and any other DOM manipulating add-ons and only enable them when required. Firebug has steadily got worse over the years in slowing down sites due to all the extra functionality that has been added to it. Therefore it should only be used when developing sites or when you need to use one of its features. The same goes for any other add-ons that you only use on certain sites or at certain times. Having less add-ons to load will increase page load times.
• In Firefox tweak your config settings to improve performance. Read this article on which settings to tweak to get the best performance possible.

Testing for Network Problems

If you are having issues with slow loading pages when browsing or video streaming then you need to find out whether the problem is local to your home or a general network problem that you need to contact your ISP about. Before doing anything else you should get some basic details of your network if you don’t know them already such as the IP address of your gateway to the internet. Open a command prompt window and type “ipconfig“. You should note down the results e.g

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ipconfig

Windows IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected

Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

Note down the IP address and the Default Gateway address.

The IP Address is your computer and the default Gateway is your connection to the outside world. In this case its a wireless router which is then connected to the Virgin Cable box. We can now test whether the network problem is with my PC to the wireless or the main router or somewhere else by doing some PING tests.

A “Ping” measures the time that passes between the initial send of the Ping, and the receival of the “Reply” by the machine you pinged. The amount of time that passes during a ping is slightly influenced by the amount of hardware the ping is passed trough, as each would have to relay the ping further. However, there is no set formula for this, as the ping speed also depends upon the speed of the network, how busy it is, and so on.

• A ping to your default gateway should be very quick e.g 1-2 ms
• A ping to other computers on your LAN should be between 1-10 MS (good)
• Pings to external websites such as http://www.google.com take anything from 20 – 150 MS anything under 50ms is good to an external site.
• Pings to sites on the other side of the world that go through many hops e.g from the UK to http://www.china.com should report times of <500ms if the network is good.

So lets do some ping’s, first to my gateway then to http://www.google.com and then to somewhere very far away e.g http://www.china.com.

Open a command prompt and then ping the IP address of your gateway which you know from the earlier ipconfig output.

Remember we are looking for a very quick response time to your gateway. The default packet size with a ping is 32 bytes so its not big and you can change this if you want to with the -l flag (lower case L) e.g:

ping -l 200 www.google.com

This would send a packet of 200 bytes of data for each ping to http://www.google.com.
This will all be explained later on when we calculate the ideal MTU (maximum transmission unit) or maximum packet size that you can send.

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping 192.168.1.3

Pinging 192.168.1.3 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.3: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.3: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.3: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.3: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.3:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping www.google.com

Pinging www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.103] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.59.103: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.103: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.103: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.103: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 216.239.59.103:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 28ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 30ms

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping www.china.com

Pinging chcache.china.com [124.238.253.102] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 124.238.253.102: bytes=32 time=606ms TTL=48
Reply from 124.238.253.102: bytes=32 time=526ms TTL=48
Reply from 124.238.253.102: bytes=32 time=446ms TTL=48
Reply from 124.238.253.102: bytes=32 time=445ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 124.238.253.102:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 445ms, Maximum = 606ms, Average = 505ms

If you are suffering packet loss or long delays then should investigate further. Another good test from the command prompt is either the tracert / traceroute command or pathping which will do a series of pings from your PC to the destination showing you the addresses of each router it has to pass through and any delay it suffers on the way. For example lets try a pathping to http://www.google.com.

C:\Documents and Settings\me>pathping www.google.com

Tracing route to www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
0  strl03455wxp.domain.compname.co.uk [192.168.1.3]
1  192.168.1.1
2  10.129.132.1
3  glfd-cam-1b-v111.network.virginmedia.net [80.4.30.233]
4  glfd-core-1b-ge-115-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.181.237]
5  gfd-bb-b-ge-220-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.89]
6  man-bb-a-ae3-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.145]
7  man-bb-b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.187.178]
8  tele-ic-3-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [212.43.163.70]
9  158-14-250-212.static.virginmedia.com [212.250.14.158]
10  209.85.255.175
11  209.85.251.190
12  66.249.95.169
13  216.239.49.126
14  gv-in-f99.1e100.net [216.239.59.99]

Computing statistics for 350 seconds...
Source to Here   This Node/Link
Hop  RTT    Lost/Sent = Pct  Lost/Sent = Pct  Address
0                                           strl03455wxp.domain.compname.co.uk
[192.168.1.3]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
1    0ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  192.168.1.1
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
2  ---     100/ 100 =100%   100/ 100 =100%  10.129.132.1
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
3   14ms     4/ 100 =  4%     4/ 100 =  4%  glfd-cam-1b-v111.network.virginmed
ia.net [80.4.30.233]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
4   16ms     2/ 100 =  2%     2/ 100 =  2%  glfd-core-1b-ge-115-0.network.virg
inmedia.net [195.182.181.237]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
5   14ms     2/ 100 =  2%     2/ 100 =  2%  gfd-bb-b-ge-220-0.network.virginme
dia.net [213.105.175.89]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
6   27ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  man-bb-a-ae3-0.network.virginmedia
.net [213.105.175.145]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
7   24ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  man-bb-b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia
.net [62.253.187.178]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
8   31ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  tele-ic-3-ae0-0.network.virginmedi
a.net [212.43.163.70]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
9   33ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  158-14-250-212.static.virginmedia.
com [212.250.14.158]
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
10   25ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  209.85.255.175
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
11   37ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  209.85.251.190
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
12   39ms     1/ 100 =  1%     1/ 100 =  1%  66.249.95.169
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
13   41ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  216.239.49.126
                 0/ 100 =  0%   |
14   35ms     0/ 100 =  0%     0/ 100 =  0%  gv-in-f99.1e100.net [216.239.59.99
]

Trace complete.

Ping / Traceroute Results Diagnosis

If you are suffering severe packet loss between routers then that could signify a problem or it may just be that the router is not set up to respond to pings and therefore any ping to that IP would report a time out.

If your ping results look okay you should try another test to compare whether the speeds promised by your broadband provider are actually being delivered to you. There are many speed test sites out there but I tend to use www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk OR www.speedtest.net which will measure your download and upload speeds.

You should always do multiple tests and then take an average reading. When I was debugging the issue with my laptop and the wireless connection it had to my main PC and router I was alternating tests between both machines and recording the times to note any difference.

Broadband providers never seem to deliver exactly what they promise but if you are currently getting anything over 2Mbps you shouldn’t be getting video streaming issues unless its High Definition movies.

Upload speeds will always be a lot less than download speeds so don’t expect equality on those two measurements however if like me you were getting periods of the day where your download speed was being measured as less than 100Kbps then there is definitely something wrong somewhere.

One thing you should remember when dealing with speeds on the net is that the measurements are different than those for disk space. 1Mb is one megabit and 1MB is one megabyte. You can always tell by the letter b as if its capitilised then its bytes and if its lower case its bits. Another thing to note is that a rate of one kilobyte per second (KBps) equals 1000 (not 1024) bytes per second.

If your network problems are intermittent then you should download a tool like networx which allows you to monitor your bandwidth usage, show hourly, daily, monthly reports, set limits on usage and run diagnosis tools such as tracert and ping but in a visual manner.

Run the bandwidth monitoring tool throughout the day and run hourly speed tests this should tell you whether your network problems happen at certain times of the day and provide you with evidence that you can then download as an XLS to provide to your ISP when you contact them to complain.

Wireless Network Issues

If like me you use a laptop that is connected to the main router by a wireless connection then you should rule out problems with the wireless set-up. Run some pings from your PC to the wireless router to check for any issues but ensure that your router is set-up to accept ping requests first.

• Make sure you have the latest firmware, software and drivers in your router, modem and network adaptor. Communications and hardware companies are always updating the software inside their devices so you should make sure you have the most up to date drivers and other software for your equipment. You should be able to download this from the manufacturers website.
• Tune your wireless access point. If you get substantially higher speeds when you connect directly to your broadband instead of using wireless networking, this can be due to interference from other Wi-Fi installations nearby, especially if you are in a city. Find out if there is a problem by plugging the network output from your broadband moden directly into the Ethernet port on your laptop or desktop and seeing if speeds improve. If so, try changing the channel of your wireless network: there’ll be a setting in its configuration screen, which you can get to via your browser. Check your handbook for details of your router. You should also try moving your laptop around the house to see if you get a better or worse signal depending on where you are.
• Make sure you are not getting electrical or radio interference from other devices in your house. Lots of gadgets including radios, media streamers, mobile phones and tools to send TV signals around the house use Wi-Fi and they’re all sharing the same airwaves. Try turning off all electrical equipment to see if that improves the signal and then one by one turn them on again until you find the culprit. Even mains wiring that runs alongside telephone or network cables can cause a problem.
• Whilst on the wireless network place your laptop right next to the main router and run some speed tests. If you are having issues with speed whilst directly next to the router then it maybe a problem with the wireless router itself.

TCP / IP Tuning

Computers are shipped with default TCP / IP settings that are designed to work with all network speeds, dial ups, DSL and Cable. This means that you can tweak various settings so that they are optimal for your computer.

There are various tools that can help you do this easily such as TuneUp Utilities or there are those such as DrTCP or TCP Optimizer that allow you to view and edit various settings such as your MTU Maximum Transmission Unit or maximum packet size and RWIN (TCP Recieve Window).

Out of both these tools TCP Optimizer offers the more configuration options, a registry editor and some tests to calculate your MTU correctly. For those of you interested in what these values mean then the MTU is the maximum Ethernet packet size your PC will send.

Calculating your ideal MTU (maximum packet size)

If a packet that is too large is sent then it will get split up into chunks (fragmented) and then re-assembled at the destination which obviously is not optimal. Therefore you want the MTU value to be the largest packet size that can be sent without becoming fragmented.

Unless otherwise set, Windows defaults MTU to 1500, or a lower value of 576 for external networks. 1500 is OK unless you are running PPPoE, want to use IPSec (Secure VPNs) or both, then it’s too big. 576 is not efficient for the broadband/Internet as it’s too small.

For Windows VISTA users it’s recommended to leave this value alone as apparently it does a pretty good job of automatically calculating these settings anyway. You can calculate this yourself with the command prompt by doing the following tests.

Windows 2000/XP users

ping -f -l 1472 www.google.com

That is a dash lower case “L,” not a dash “1.” Also note the spaces in between the sections.

Linux users

ping -s 1472 www.google.com

OS X users

ping -D -s 1472 www.dslreports.com

Linux and OS X commands are case sensitive.

Press Enter.

Then reduce 1472 by 10 until you no longer get the “packet needs to be fragmented” error message.

Then increase by 1 until you are 1 less away from getting the “packet need to be fragmented” message again. Add 28 more to this (since you specified ping packet size, not including IP/ICMP header of 28 bytes), and this is your MaxMTU.

If you can ping through with the number at 1472, you are done! Stop right there.

Add 28 and your MaxMTU is 1500. For PPPoE, your MaxMTU should be no more than 1492 to allow space for the 8 byte PPPoE “wrapper,” but again, experiment to find the optimal value.

For PPPoE, the stakes are high as if you get your MTU wrong, you may not just be sub-optimal, things like uploading files or web pages may stall or not work at all! This example output of mine shows you how to do it.

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping -f -l 1472 www.google.com

Pinging www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] with 1472 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 216.239.59.147:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping -f -l 1462 www.google.com

Pinging www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] with 1462 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1462) time=33ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1462) time=31ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1462) time=33ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1462) time=42ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 216.239.59.147:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 42ms, Average = 34ms

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping -f -l 1463 www.google.com

Pinging www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] with 1463 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1463) time=32ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1463) time=29ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1463) time=30ms TTL=52
Reply from 216.239.59.147: bytes=64 (sent 1463) time=32ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 216.239.59.147:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 29ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 30ms

C:\Documents and Settings\me>ping -f -l 1465 www.google.com

Pinging www-tmmdi.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] with 1465 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 216.239.59.147:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

There you go the MTU is 1464 + 28 = 1492

The other settings available in the TCP tools are:

Tcp1323Opts

This parameter controls the use of RFC 1323 Timestamp and Window Scale TCP options. Explicit settings for timestamps and window scaling are manipulated with flag bits. Bit 0 controls window scaling, and bit 1 controls timestamps.

GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize

The TcpWindowSize parameter can be used to set the receive window on a per-interface basis. This parameter can be used to set a global limit for the TCP window size on a system-wide basis.

TCP Window size

This parameter determines the maximum TCP receive window size offered. The receive window specifies the number of bytes that a sender can transmit without receiving an acknowledgment. In general, larger receive windows improve performance over high-delay, high-bandwidth networks.

For greatest efficiency, the receive window should be an even multiple of the TCP Maximum Segment Size (MSS). This parameter is both a per-interface parameter and a global parameter, depending upon where the registry key is located. If there is a value for a specific interface, that value overrides the system-wide value.  See also GobalMaxTcpWindowSize.

When to contact your ISP

If you have cleaned and tuned your computer and browser and optimised all settings and still having problems related to network speed then contact your ISP. If you contact them without doing some research then prepared to be fobbed off with some story about intermittent slow downs due to school kids coming home or other rubbish.

Provide them with as much information that you have gathered as possible. You never know they may offer you a new modem like they did to me which solved all my speed issues as soon as it was plugged in.

Hopefully this article has been a good guide to performance tweaks and remember if you want to do it the easy way purchase TuneUp Utilities as it could save your a lot of time, effort and heartache. I don’t often recommend software to buy but for only £29.99 you cannot really go wrong when compared with the amount of time you will save.