Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Twitter's Different Faces

Happy Twitter Morning to all!

I've been blogging seriously for more than 13 months and having blogger friends constantly brings in rural high speed internet new experience for me. I get to interact with them through different means and one of those is through Twitter.

Before, I really had a challeging time to understand the value of Twitter. I wondered why a lot of bloggers raved about using Twitter as part of their blogging activities. Even Problogger himself analysed why people love this microblogging site.

Little by little, I see Twitters check your internet speed in my blogging activities. I remembered using Twitter to interact with other bloggers, pick their brains once in a while and use those to be inspired in writing some of my blog posts.

Aside from that, I also benefitted from this as I noticed the increase of blog traffic in most of my blogs. Before, I would really spend much time on Entrecard, dropping like there's no tomorrow. Now, I have found an additional avenue to gain visitors on all my blogs because of Twitter :)

To strike a balance, Twitter can also be an avenue to help non-bloggers in need. Months ago, I published a post about asking people to help our fellow Filipinos in Cagayan as they were stuck in flood for days. Together with a day of using Plurk for the same goal, I felt the response of our fellow 'kababayans' who twitted and plurked back with their pledges.

It was so overwhelming right? I mean, using Twitter to make money online but also to give back to the community. :)

I just have a wish though. That Twitter stay good for a long time. A lot of people, bloggers and non-bloggers will benefit from it, if they just know how to use it properly.

If you are a regular internet user, be it at home or at work, chances are you have heard the term a"firewall". When asked what exactly a firewall is though, many people have a limited amount of knowledge, knowing only small business broadband it is something that protects computer systems.

Quite simply, this is correct; the basic principle behind a firewall is to act s a barrier between the internet and a local computer. This local computer can either be a standalone system, part of a home network or a larger office network.

Regardless, a firewall works the same way by keeping out unwanted hackers and/or preventing users from performing certain actions (e.g. viewing offensive websites or downloading programmes).

A firewall can either be located on a computer system, (known as a software firewall), within a network router, (known as a hardware firewall), or both.

Nearly all of today's network routers have built in firewalls which can be configured via the computers internet browser to which they are connected. Most home computer systems are pre-installed with a software firewall; there is also a great deal of free firewalls available on the internet.

Both hardware and software firewalls work in similar ways to keep your system secure and for maximum security a combination of the two is recommended. In order to protect your system a firewall uses one or both of the following methods:

  • Packet Filtering is used to compare data (or packets) that reach the firewall to predefined filters, if the data complies with the filters then it is allowed through, otherwise it is dropped.
  • Stateful inspection is a newer technology which unlike packet filtering does not analyse the whole packet, but just key netgear streamyx Specific characteristics of outbound packets are compared to inbound packets and if the comparison is acceptable the data is allowed into the network, otherwise it is dropped.

By using the above technologies users are able to allow or deny traffic into and out of their network based upon IP addresses, domain names, protocols and ports.

A firewall set up on your broadband connection protects you from a whole host of problems. By protecting your broadband connection you can make your browsing experience much safer and faster. If you feels as though you could be getting a better a deal elsewhere then compare broadband online today.