The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser, and is self-contained. The Tor IM Browser Bundleadditionally allows instant messaging and chat over Tor. If you would prefer to use your existing web browser, install Tor permanently, or if you don’t use Windows, see the other ways to download Tor.
Freedom House has produced a video on how to find and use the Tor Browser Bundle. If you don’t see a video below, view it at Youtube . Know of a better video or one translated into your language? Let us know!
and if you now want to see or check your own website for a Denial of Service attack , download this
This is the software for which 32 Turkish teenagers got arrested for bringing down their govt websites. Do NOT USE it for ILLEGAL purposes,
because 1) it is hosted on a western website that due to Patriot Act would tracking downloads as well as most likely be inserting some logging code into your computer (especially if you are still on Windows)
2) Turkey being a NATO member got rather immediate notice of this – which makes it very likely that this tool is compromised in the Western Hemisphere. You can probably use this in Eastern Hemisphere country excluding Israel, Turkey, China, India ,Korea or Japan because these countries do have sophisticated hackers working for the government as well.
3) This is just a beginners tool to understand how flooding a website with requests work.
Note the Failed Tab tells you how good or bad this method is.
Note – it wont work on my blogs hosted on wordpress.com- but then those blogs had a root level breach some time back. It did work on both my blogspot and my tumblr blogs, and it completely shattered my son’s self hosted wordpress blog (see below)
1100 “Friends” on Facebook, and 9429 “Connections” on Linkedin
Deleting Facebook was an emotionally wrenching decision- see this screenshot- I tried to download all my account- family photos (320 mb) but connection kept breaking-
so I had just deactivate and not delete the account. You win, Zuckenberg
How to-
Right Hand Top Corner —-Account Settings- Deactivate Account
After Facebook de activates your account- it mocks you by saying this this in YELLOW “
Your Facebook account has been deactivated.
To reactivate your account, log in using your old login email and password. You will be able to use the site like you used to.
We hope you come back soon.”
I go back to Facebook to download all my family photos before final deletion (and not just de activation)- I get this message
It may take a little while for us to gather all of your photos, wall posts, messages, and other information. We will then ask you to verify your identity in order to help protect the security of your account.
Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider? Was it something we said? Tell us.
Before you deactivate your account, know this:
This action is permanent: account restoration is currently disabled.
You do not need to deactivate your account to change your username. (You can change it on the settings page. All @replies and followers will remain unchanged.)
Your account may be viewable on twitter.com for a few days after deactivation.
We have no control over content indexed by search engines like Google.
If you’re creating a new account and want to use the same user name, phone number and/or email address associated with this account, you must first change them on this account before you deactivate it. If you don’t, the information will be tied to this account and unavailable for use.
Okay, fine, deactivate my account (thats the button)
I clicked the Okay fine Button.
One more pop up-
Re-enter your Twitter password to deactivate @DecisionStats.
Ok Done-
Twitter tries to scare me again —-
You deactivated your account.
Account restoration is currently unavailable. Here is the message you agreed to before deactivating your account:
his action is permanent.
Before you deactivate your account, know this:
This action is permanent: account restoration is currently disabled.
You do not need to deactivate your account to change your username. (You can change it on the settings page. All @replies and followers will remain unchanged.)
Your account may be viewable on twitter.com for a few days after deactivation.
We have no control over content indexed by search engines like Google.
If you’re creating a new account and want to use the same user name, phone number and/or email address associated with this account, you must first change them on this account before you deactivate it. If you don’t, the information will be tied to this account and unavailable for use.
So Long Twitter, I gotta spend more time with my offline family okay.
And probably anyone trying to do sentiment analysis on my twitter feed for social media analytics now has an incomplete data point (hehe)
Last One- Linkedin 9349 connections are valuable- I was thinking of auctioning this on E Bay but they kicked me out.
So I just go for deletion.
I spend 10 minuted looking for the delete account button-this is getting a bit annoying now.
Linkedin neither scares me nor emotionally coddles me – This is what is says-
Closing Your Account
How do I close my account?
Log into the account you wish to close.
Hover your cursor over your name in the top right of your home page and then click “Settings”.
Click on “Close Your Account” under Personal Information.
Select a reason for closing your account.
Click on “Continue”.
Members should only have one LinkedIn account. Multiple accounts can prevent the ability to accept an Invitation. Closing additional accounts should resolve this dilemma. Prior to closing any secondary accounts:
Inventory all connections and identify any that may be missing from the primary account you wish to keep.
Send Invitations to those connections missing from the primary account.
Update any profile information that maybe on other account profiles.
I dont think I will send that many invites again- but some of these people have been good to me ( 18 of them even wrote recommendations- which are non exportable it seems)
I check my downloaded csv file- yup all 9379 email addresses are there.
Final round-
Update- Linkedin does NOT get deleted. I get this-
Your close account request must be processed by customer support for the following reason:
You have more than 250 connections.
You will receive a confirmation email from customer support indicating that they received your request to close your account.
The account that customer support will process for closure is below:
Ajay Ohri
9,429 Connections
16 Recommendations
ohri2007@gmail.com (primary address)
and the email says
Member Comment: ajay ohri
11/24/2010 23:10
Member ID: 6691344 Member Name: Ajay Ohri
The member has attempted to self close this account and was unable because:
The member has a large network of connections to close. Please close during non peak hours.
Please confirm with the member when his or her account has been successfully closed.
So long people- you know where to find me- on this blog (and some on skype).
Step 1 is to create internal motivation to create a blog in the first place
Step 2 is to find what to write
Reasons Bloggers Blog-
Basic -Ranting
Examples- I hate Facebook Platform team treats me badly with waits, and breaks my code.
SAS Marketing wont give me a big discount to make me look good in front of my boss.
Companies wont give me their software for free- even though I will use it to make money (and not play X Box)
I want my vendors to be FOSS but my customers to switch to SaaS.
Google wont do this- Apple wont do that- Microsoft wont do those.
Revolution would give me 4 great packages but not the open source for RevoScaler (which only 300 people would understand in the first place)
Safety-
I better kiss the Professor and give a Turkey for dinner, as he sits on my thesis committee.
I will recommend Prof X’s lousy book in the hope he recommends my lousy book as a textbook too.
It is safe to laugh when the boss is making a joke-I should comment on her corporate blog, and retweet her.
Belonging-
I belong to this great online community of smart people. Let me agree to what they say.
I really believe in EVERYTHING that ALL the 2 MILLION members of the community have to say ALL the TIME.
I belong to this online community because all my friends are on my computer.
4 Egositic
My blog page rank is now X plus delta tau because of sugary key words (2004)
My technorati numbers rise (2005)
I was once on Digg (2007)
I have Z * exp N followers on Twitter and even more on Facebook (2008)
My Klout is increasing on twitter, My stack overflow reputation ‘s cup floweth over. (2009)
My Karma on Reddit is more important than my Karma in real life (2010)
Self Actualization-
I got time to kill- and I think I may learn more, meet intersting people and discover something wandering on the internet.
All those who wonder are not lost- Wikiquote
I got a story to tell, poems to write, code to give away. A free Blog is something a Chinese , an Iranian and a North korean really really know what the value is.
But after all that, WHY Do Bloggers Blog?
Because we are still waiting for Facebook to create the Blog Killer.
Its better than saying I am unemployed and a social loner
Here are the summaries of some excellent success stories that KXEN has achieved working with partners in the financial world over the years.
Fraud Modeling- Disbank (acquired by Fortis) Turkey
1. Dısbank increased the number of identified fraudulent applications by 200% from 7 to 21 per day.
2.More than 50 fraudsters using counterfeit cards at merchant locations or fraudulent applications have been arrested after April 2004 when the fraud modeling system was set.
A large Bank on the U.S. East Coast
1.Response Modeling
Previously it took the modeling group four weeks to build one model with several hundred variables, using traditional modeling tools. KXEN took one hour for the same problem and doubled the lift in the top decile because it included variables that had not been used for this business question before.
2.Data Quality
Building a Cross/Up-sell Model for a direct marketing campaign to high net worth customers, the modelers needed four weeks using 1500 variables. Again it took one hour with KXEN, which uncovered significant problems with some of the top predictive variables. Further investigation proved that these problems were created in the data merge of the mail file and response file, creating several “perfect” predictors. The model was re-run, removing these variables, and immediately put into production.
Le Crédit Lyonnais
1.Around 160 score models now built annually – compared to around 10 previously – for 130 direct marketing campaigns.
2.KXEN software has allowed LCL to drive up response rates, leading to more value-added services for customers.
Finansbank, Turkey
1.Within 4 months of starting the project to combat dormancy using KXEN’s solution, the bank had successfully reactivated half its previously dormant customers as per Kunter Kutluay, Finansbank Director of Marketing and Risk Analytics.
Bank Austria Creditanstalt , Austria
1.Some 4.5 terabytes of data are held in the bank’s operational systems, with a further 2 terabytes archived. Analytical models created in KXEN are automatically fed through the bank’s scoring engine in batches weekly
or monthly depending on the schema.
“But we are looking at a success rate of target customer deals in the area of three to five per cent with KXEN.
Before that, it was one per cent or less. ”
Werner Widhalm, Head of the Customer Knowledge Management Unit.
Barclays
1.Barclays’ Teradata warehouse holds information on some 14 million active customers, with data
on many different aspects of customer behaviour. Previously, analysts had to manually whittle down several thousand fields of data to a core of only a few hundred to fit the limitations of the modelling process. Now, all of the variables can be fed straight into the predictive model.
Summary– KXEN has achieved tremendous response in all aspects of data modelling in financial sector where time in building, deploying and analyzing model is much more crucial than many other sectors. I would be following this with other case studies on other KXEN successes across multiple domains.
DECISION STATS 