Tip: Using nmcli to connect to Internet in Enlightenment

If you are using Enlightenment in OpenSUSE or some other Linux distribution¹ , chances are you may face problems in using the NetworkManager to connect to Internet.

This is because the  NetworkManager applet (nm-applet) doesn't show itself in the taskbar of the Enlightenment desktop. And as the saying goes - what you can't see, you can't control.

Google Releases A Free, Interactive Book On Browsers and The Web

Google, in its pursuit of bringing awareness about Internet among the masses has executed a unique project in the form of an interactive book on web browsers and the Internet.

Google's Bus to Internet Nirvana launched in Tamil Nadu

Google India has launched what is being dubbed the Google Bus. It is a specially furnished bus with Internet connectivity, which will be touring different towns in Tamil Nadu - a state of India. The aim of the bus is to introduce, inspire and educate the general populace on the power of the Internet and how it can benefit common people.

Seeking to attract more people on the information superhighway, the bus will be touring 15 towns in Tamil Nadu over a span of 45 days. India is projected to have Internet connectivity of around 20 million by the year 2010. And perhaps, the Google bus is Google's way of ensuring it gets to garner maximum portion of this pie. Google is providing updates of the bus trip at the specially set up The Internet Bus Project web page.

World map of Internet connectivity

Care to know the level of Internet connectivity in your country ? Or rather, you would like to know which all areas in the world are the most densely wired. Well here is a pictorial representation of the density of Internet connection.

Fig: Internet connectivity world map

The aptly named "Internet Map" is the creation of Cris Harrison. To create the set of visual maps, he made use of the data from the DIMES project which is a distributed scientific research project, aimed to study the structure and topology of the Internet - a purely volunteer effort on the lines of SETI@HOME project.

Not surprisingly, Europe, USA and Japan lead in the most wired areas in the world.

View the full set of maps of the internet connectivity across the world at Cris Harrison's site.

Care to break the law using GNU/Linux ? Then here are a couple of ways of getting free internet access.

The dawn of the internet era has seen more and more people jump on to the internet bandwagon and spend a significant part of their free as well as work time online. Each day we find different ways in which we can make use of the Internet and slowly but surely, the world wide web is getting more and more ingrained in our daily lives. And as with any popular medium, we find energy being dissipated in various quarters in getting free access to it by taking advantage of the loopholes found in the technology being used.

Doug has an interesting article where he describes how to use ICMP tunneling to get access to your neighbours internet connection.

ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol which is used to carry the information about the status of the network. It has a wide variety of uses such as reporting on the availability of remote hosts, the errors in the underlying network and detecting network congestion. 'ping' - one of the most common programs which is used to test the network connectivity of up to three layers of OSI model uses ICMP to do its task.

And on a different note, Karl Bitz explains how to crack WEP using a machine running Ubuntu. The usual assumptions in both cases being that you as well as the neighbour in question rely on wireless technology to connect to the internet.

On a personal note, I do not support illegal ways of gaining things. In fact one very strong motivating factor for me to embrace GNU/Linux was the freedom from being dependent on (often pirated) proprietary software. But from a theoretical point of view, both the articles are interesting because they throw a wee bit more light on the technologies underlying the wireless internet access.