• 161 posts (including this one) in total
• those posts have 1522 tags associated with them (not each though…)
• 164 comments entered you (I should say legit comments because of the next line)
• 3070 spam comments blocked. This, I should mention, has SHARPLY increased over time, but seems to have settled now on ~700-900 spam comments a month.

• Roughly 12.000 people (excluding myself) at some point visited the site (according to Google Analytics)
• barelyadraft has a massive 9 fans on facebook (including myself :S), but they are VERY committed fans, so counts like 9000 I would say :X.

The top 5 most read posts are:

1. Interesting scientific article on age and length of intercourse (read: sex). Here’s what to expect from your partner in bed depending on age
2. Some random thoughts on a few of the reasons I don’t believe in God (English)
3. A visualization of the 3 kinds of sex in the world today (comic)
4. By looking at your facebook I can determine if you are narcissistic
5. “I’m With Stupid” T-Shirt I want badly (English)

I think it’s easy to spot what people want to read about: Sex, religion, facebook and cool t-shirts. Life isn’t so complicated when you think about it! The interesting though, is that the first above article constitute about the half of all the pageviews on barelyadraft.com. :S

Finish and post these articles

There’s about ~85 articles that have been started in some way that has never been finished. Now there could be gold in these articles, or there could not, but it’s up to you, my dear reader (singular), so tell me what you want so I can start pleasing with my magic fingers (…for typing…get out of the gutter!!). Remember you can pick a maximum of 3 different articles that should be finished!

You might also be interested in reading:

1. Detailed statistics of spam received in a month in February 2008
2. The world’s most useful WordPress plugin (English)
3. barelyadraft.com is on facebook and fans speak out (English)

I wrote a little big about why it might be good to be a little careful when being online about a week ago here – so I won’t go into that too much. For this post I will focus on the two options I have found will suit my needs, but which should I (and you!) choose? It’s time for…

Trying for anonymity online isn’t new. Recently the Tor network has gotten some attention. Also old-timers like Freenet, free VPN connection solutions such as Hotspot Shield are there and even free proxies are touted by  enthusiasts as options, but the conclusion is always the same: It works like crap, is horrendously slow and requires a lot of work to maintain or along those lines.

For me, having a full time job, having to keep up writing posts  on my blog, running marathons, going to dive bars with my girlfriend playing dart (yup, we did that last Saturday night – I won!! woot woot!!) – sorry got sidetracked there for a minute. Anyway, bottom line?! I’m busy, I need something that works and I am willing to pay for it! I need a solution that works for my girlfriend! What works for her? Something that requires zero maintenence, zero new processses, works behind the scenes – i.e. just-works. And I have a very good incentive to keep it simple when I implement anything that affects anything she does on her computer – If it does work I have her on my back asking “when will it be fixed?”.

IPREDator.se

Alright, so looking at IPREdator, I have to say, it works beautifully. I was invited in to the beta program lasdt week and have been trying IPREDator out since then – I mean how could I resist, it cost just €15 try for 3 months, so why not?! It’s a dead simple setup (PPTP), which makes securing your connection a breeze. But the biggest thing is really the speed of the service – it’s top notch for any VPN service out there. Of course since the server is in Malmö in Sweden and I live a mere 40km away from that server, this could influence my experience compared to the other VPN solutions I have tried. At any rate, it’s as fast a my regular connection (10Mbit download), so there’s not performance loss.  Another great thing is that all ports seem to be forwarded, so direct connections when downloading torrents works blazingly fast. Hope this holds true even after they start en open beta or release the final service.

Really, for me, the only real downside of the service is that the IP is Swedish and therefore I cannot access all the American or UK only services I use/want to use. I’m thinking hulu.com video, last.fm radio, iBBC Player video, pandora.com radio and all the TV network sites.

But I highly recommend it. Go get signed up already on ipredator.se for the beta and they’ll probably invite you soon enough.

Ivacy.com

I actually signed up for Ivacy.com just a week or two before I got let in the IPREDator.se beta program, and I have to say I am really impressed by all the things it has to offer. It’s also therefore pretty sad that the service has some severe reliability issues in relation to speed and to access points.

Now don’t get me wrong, ivacy.com is AWESOME and I really recommend it. They have a lot of very useful services that make it stand out compared to other services, as long as they fix their speed and access point reliability. Regarding speed, this could of course be somewhat low because I am located in Denmark and the access point I use is in the US (probably the West Coast), which could influence the results. But there’s no excuse that the access point has been down!

Enough about the problems, let’s look at what you get with the service. Now it’s almost double the price of IPREdator, so obviously they have to offer more. I can’t mention all of it in this post, but you can check it out in the pros/cons table below. I will say that the full binary usenet access is very nice, but the really killer feature for me is the private dark net (meaning a kind of internet available only when you are connected securely and anonymously to through the ivacy vpn connection). The dark currently has 4 cool services that makes it totally worth the money.

The most important and useful one is instant.torrents.site (<= link only works when you are connected through the ivacy vpn btw). Here yo you can get the instant-torrents site to download any torrent to the site and then you just download it via regular HTTP download afterwards (with resume). The cool part is of course twofold – you’re not exposing yourself to downloading of torrents at all and you don’t have to leave your computer turned on while it happens. And it works brilliantly! Especially useful if you are donwnloading very big torrents. Another cool feature is the instant-music.site (again, only when connected via vpn), where you have all popular music to download instantly. It’s a like an iTunes store for cheap.

The final feature I would like to highlight is the fact that you can connect via UK, Russian or US access points (US access point currently down at time of writing…grrr….), which means you can get access to e.g. US only sites. This means, for me, that I can see all the tv shows I follow online via hulu.com, the respective networks homepages (e.g. cbs.com), internet radio sites (e.g. last.fm – which costs $3/month in  Denmark for free radio) and of course this also applies to setting up VPN on the iPhone to e.g. use the Pandora, last.fm radio applications or download applications that are only available in the US App store.

Also, with ivacy.com you get several connection options compared to IPREDator. You can of course setup a regular PPTP VPN setup, but you can also download a Firefox extension which allows you to just secure the Firefox application instead of everything on the comptuer (works great for using the instant-torrents.site service). There’s also a pre-compiled Firefox browser for download that can be run from a USB drive with instant anonymity! great stuff!

So go sign up and get 100MB free traffic to test out the service. Sign up here

Which should you/I choose in the end?

It’s a tough choice. It really depends on your needs. If all you want it anonymous an fast download of torrents, then IPREDator.se is definitely the way to go, but if you also use internet radio, need access to US only sites, use usenet service or see value in the darknets available that I described above, well then it’s no-brainer, ivacy.com is definitley a-go!

You might also be interested in reading:

1. Anonymous SIP – yet another reason to use ivacy.com as your VPN provider
2. IPREDator VPN for anonymous filesharing and an introduction to the alternative
3. Getting new music by recording it with LastSharp (English)

So I started looking for how I could secure myself from ending up like the single mom? Well first of all, I wouldn’t download songs by Gloria Estefan (and definitely not at a $80.000/song rate as the single-mom did), but that’s a given! Next, I wouldn’t use LimeWire or any network client based on the Gnutella protocol (or any other non-bittorrent), because even with tools like PeerGuardian, you’re a sitting duck waiting to be nailed. Did I mention, btw, that back in the good old days of p2p I got a nasty letter from the MPAA where they urged my ISP to shut-down my internet connection and prosecute me?! (needless to say for completely fraudulent charges of course (douché bags should have done their homework..tsk tsk), but still, if I had consorted in such devious and illegal activities I would have been slammed legally, so repeat the morale: don’t use LimeWire or the likes of it).

Anyway, all to help all the single-moms out there, this didn’t go unnoticed by the good people of The Pirate Bay. Also, it didn’t go unnoticed by the, also good people, of the Swedish Government (btw, Denmark beat the living bejesus out of the Swedish soccer team not too long ago – Denmark FTW). So the Swedish Governemtn made the first move, apparently by reading 1984 by George Orwell, and thinking “yeah, let’s move towards that society depicted in the book), so they passed the IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) into law.

Sweden implemented a new law, the IPRED, which basically gives the copyright holders the right to demand ISP’s to deliver name and addresses of any people they suspect of having done anything illegal, so they can prosecute them (note that a copyright holder is allowed this before they can prove, or have proven, 1. that the person in question has done something illegal, and 2. having positively indentified that the person in question is also the owner of the internet connection was also the one using the internet connection for illegal purposes. Amazing that big corporations are favored so heavily over consumers!! Shame on your Swedish politicians!! (I should note, for good measure, that Danish ones aren’t much better having ISP’s implement DNS blocking of certain sites, including The Pirate Bay. Use OpenDNS to circumvent it btw…)

The Pirate Bay indirectly replied to the IPRED law with a”this s*cks cowb*lls” type message and announced they would introduce a private “for pay” network, where you for €5/month could access everything on The Pirate Bay without risk of being caught doing something illegal, should you inadvertently download something that was illegal from The Pirate Bay (among all the great legal stuff like e.g. Steal This Film – there’s also a sequel btw)… This network network is called “IPREDator“ (<= clever right? get it? IPREDator - so it’s like the opposite of the law…haha…I’m sure we all had a good laugh about that one…. *sigh* (note sarcasm please)). Anyway, the IPREDator is basiclly just a Virtual Private Network (VPN), so that no one on the network can be identified as coming from Sweden (and thus, the Swedish IPRED law can’t apply..tadaaa). Of course, the added benefit is that no one can identify anyone on the network and no logs of any activity is saved, so you’re home free, prosecution wise.

So naturally you should be well on your way to the IPREDator site and signing up for downloading immunity right? well I forgot to mention, there is a slight catch – it’s in private beta at the moment and only 3000 lucky people (Swedish people I imagine) have been allowed to participate for now. There’s another 180.000 people signup for beta waiting to be let in. That 180.000 people in front of you in line, which is quite similar to the lines that formed for the recent iPhone 3G S launch. So what’s the alternative or do you have to wait, like you’re waiting and have waited for Duke Nukem Forever? Of course not! There are  alternatives, and I’ve tried one of them and have to say I am VERY impressed!

Ivacy.com is what it’s called (again, soooo (note the sarcasm please) clever that they got the ivacy.com domain name which allowed them to use the pr.ivacy.com name in public…get it? pr.iacy.com? almost privacy.com right? yeah, but privacy.com was too expensive for those cheapskates…). Luckily all the money they didn’t spend on the domain name, they used to make a great service! And a great service it is! Much too long to write in this post, so read more about following the link below. In short Ivacy provides torrent downloading for you, VPN can be used on an iPhone to get Pandora, Last.fm iPhone radio integration, will also you to access all the great programming from hulu.com, southparkstudios.com, cbs.com etc. (bascially all the American TV shows), the BBC iPlayer works (when choosing a UK IP),  etc. If it sounds like gibberish above, I’ll explain in the post below when I get the time to finish writing it, but the shor of it is that it’s a decent value for the €10/month in my opinion…

• Read the review of the Ivacy.com & IPREDator VPN services

You might also be interested in reading:

1. IPREDator vs. Ivacy.com VPN service – fits my needs perfectly
2. Anonymous SIP – yet another reason to use ivacy.com as your VPN provider
3. OpenOffice grows up, turns 3.0 and it now a real alternative to Microsoft Office for some people

So now the site is constantly updated with with new stuff everytime you visit it. This is acutally not that important for the site as 80% are new visists (apparently I haven’t found the magic formulary for getting people to come again…yet!!).

Also, below is also a list of the same links you can find on the right side of the blog (as indicated in the picture in this post).

• Sexy Shower Curtain
• Wikipedia Founder Says Apps, Not Paywalls, Could Save the News
• Lær af andres lysdiagrammer
• This Is Not a Dollhouse [Architecture]
• Ubuntu 10.10 beta arrives with new netbook UI
• This Is How iOS 4.1 HDR Photos Look In Reality [Apple]
• AirDropper Requests Files via Email and Saves to Your Dropbox [File Sharing]
• Model the world with Google SketchUp 8

Wow, no related posts exists on the site.

I haven’t tried it myself as I am not quite sure if it is legal in Denmark, but logically it should be as it is just recording online radio, and recording radio is legal. But you know, I better stay out of harms way. But intriguing program right?

You might also be interested in reading:

1. Music I have recently been finding myself listening to (English)
2. Comedy & Music is a mix I love (starring Justin Timberlake) (English)
3. The Script – Breakeven song underscores I don’t listen to lyrics (English)