Riding the YouTube Money Train

I’ve recently noticed there seems to be a new way of making money on YouTube that is perhaps a bit simpler to reproduce than some of the traditional ways. Of course, we’d all love to become some sort of YouTube trend setter with an army of millions of followers hanging on our every move. If you do manage to get to this point it’s pretty difficult not to make money unless you do something stupid and get kicked off the Partner programme like Logan Paul did.

The problem is that it’s not that easy to achieve if you’re a middle aged, camera shy ordinary bloke who thinks all these superstar vloggers are irritating pr##ks. So if you’ve come to terms to the fact that your force of personality isn’t going to create an internet empire what’s your options?

Well for the technical among us there’s another option, just game the system slightly and it seems many people are doing just this. I recently found a video explaining some vague technical computing concept on YouTube. It had a modest amount of views but the interesting thing was that it seemed that it was created almost entirely by software. From the structure to the voice (one of those crap robotic voices) the whole thing looked like it was churned out of some video factory. Frankly it wasn’t very good.

On even further investigation, I noticed the channel had over 45,000 different videos and millions of views. Basically the channels was simply created on volume, by churning out video after video they were probably generating a serious amount of advertising revenue.

Now this intrigued me, although the videos I saw weren’t very good – the concept of volume is definitely one I can relate too. I have had mixed results with YouTube videos, some I spend ages on and only produce a few views. Others I dash off in minutes and go on to be very successful – the key is definitely keep churning them out.

That’s of course easier said than done, but there’s loads of software out these now that makes this possible. One of the best is something called Content Samurai which you can see in this video – Create Videos Quickly . It’s software that lets you input some text and then turn it into a video very quickly with the minimum of input.

The results are very good, but the important part is that you can literally create a decent looking video in a few minutes and upload it to YouTube. So some will be successful, some will flop and others will just ride along picking up a decent amount of traffic, but the key is that every video you produce should slowly add exposure for your product, website or offer.

Further Reading: Find an Australian Proxy, John Summers.

How do People Give Up Alcohol?

Last updated on April 11th, 2018 at 07:32 am

When you sit and watch the news or documentaries around the world, it’s full of stories about drug wars, cocaine addiction and crystal meth addicts. However in the fairly tame middle class world that a lot of us inhabit there’s something which causes much more damage and that’s alcohol. As millions of us try and cope with an increasingly stressful and competitive world alcohol abuse is becoming a huge problem for ordinary people. Here’s a quick primer on some of the methods people use to give up alcohol, and you can see further method using a drug called Selincro in this other post.

There are various reported techniques on the way to quit drinking alcohol on one’s own. While some lack, some are useful. Even light drinkers can experience these signs, particularly if it became a part of their daily lives. The quality of your life cans improve, but stopping this habit might damage your health. This article will explore the various ways to cease drinking alcohol on one’s own without suffering from the severe adverse effects of alcohol withdrawal. Stop drinking alcohol without AA through At Home Detoxification – Alcoholic Anonymous has become several individuals lifesaver with drinking issues.

Nevertheless, recovers from alcoholism. Additionally, there are methods to give up alcohol similar to performing at home cleansing, on one. Detoxification is the process of eliminating toxins within your body. Detox is a misnomer as it does involve the removal of alcohol. What it does is make you off alcohol and comfortably. Detoxification is usually done at detoxification centers, but you might also do it at home. At home detoxification do it at home aren’t yet alcohol dependents. The process of at home alcohol detoxification is a straightforward way on to stop drinking on one’s own. Are potassium rich foods such as oranges, bananas, and green leaf vegetable many of water, and blankets and sweatshirts.

On manner on to quit drinking on at home detox concentrates. Drinking plenty of water. Keep the body hydrated and aids in preventing the potassium due to shedding. Cover yourself with blankets and place on sweatshirts that are heavy to permit yourself to sweat. Taking long hot baths might also help so helps reduce the withdrawal symptoms. The way Cover yourself with blankets and drugs – Common beverage alcohol is regarded long as you keep yourself hydrated nerve system depressant, that is that the same as sedatives, barbiturates, and anesthetics. Among the initial methods on the way as a drug that functions as a lessening the intake gradually.

This approach is known as gradual tapering approach, a technique utilized to stop drinking is by. This method do it at home aren’t in alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation centers. Gradually lowering the amount of booze you take can also causes some withdrawal alcoholics and suffer from withdrawal symptoms uneasiness, agitation, diarrhea, and anxiety. Taking over the counter medications might symptoms, like nausea, shaking, nausea, sleeplessness, adverse effects. Mild analgesic and medications for headaches, nausea, and diarrhea can lessen that the symptoms throughout the gradual tapering approach. Reducing your alcohol consumption is among aid in preventing and reducing these drinking.

Jim Williams

http://uktvabroad.org/

Using Ideas to Create Achievable Results

Last updated on April 11th, 2018 at 11:59 am

Starting up a new venture is always fraught with complications but the bumpy journey can be smoothed with creative ideas for successful results that can yield surprising possibilities.

This is not such a far flung concept either when you consider that all new businesses started life as nothing more than an idea in someone’s head.

We all have ideas, some more than others but it is in these little sparks of mental creativity that giant business concepts lie waiting to be born in the real world. You only have to look back in time to see how certain small snippets of creative potential brain power formed into innovative ideas (see: www.axcp.org) have turned around the fortunes of many an entrepreneur in all manner of business opportunities.

Creating Something Out of Nothing

Back at the end of the 19th century, the very idea that man could fly was considered a fanciful dream that could never possibly become a reality. Yet there were many who tried with designs based on the things they knew that could flu, such as birds and insects.

Then the Wright brothers, who had the idea for a fixed-wing design, put their idea into solid reality. Nobody else (at the time) believed that it was possible for a human being to fly.

Yet despite the naysayers and disbelievers, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first powered flight, thus proving the skeptics wrong.

Just think of how some of our most taken for granted aspects of modern life only came into being because someone had an idea and the determination to make it a reality. Often in spite of fierce resistance from detractors and those that refused to believe.

The Pioneers in Ideas

Marconi had the idea of transmitting sound waves through the ether without the use of wires. But his friends had him committed to a mental institution for assessment. Yet here we are today, able to enjoy the convenience of the radio that when it was first brought to the public was considered a miracle.

Thomas Edison got it into his head that he could create a source of light that could use electricity as its fuel rather than having to rely on candles, oil and gas lamps. His remarkable tenacity backed by an idea saw the creation of the first incandescent light bulb closely followed by many other amazing inventions leading to great social recognition for his endeavors.

F.W. Woolworth had the idea of selling items cheaply in a big store and in a relatively short space of time his 5 and 10 cent stores were a big attraction making him a multi-millionaire! Henry Ford dreamed of the car for the people and within twenty years had produced one of the biggest automobile companies in the world.

More recently, an unknown programmer created an operating system that would power small IBM computers and soon the Microsoft Corporation was founded. That same programmer became its CEO and Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet.

Ideas are powerful entities when they are plucked from their place in the ether by their creators and turned into definite plans for a new venture. Indeed, they are truly the seeds of success in the making.

Anyone for Tennis?

Last updated on July 23rd, 2017 at 10:05 am

There is no doubt in my mind that the right sports coverage is essential to the enjoyment of an event. Of course, actually attending and watching live is the best way to watch sport but there are often practical reasons that is not possible. If you’ve ever tried to buy a ticket and arrange accommodation for a Champions League Final you’ll know what I mean, in fact even the hotel room can cost a King’s ransom.

Even without the cost, there are other reasons for avoiding the live event. An important one for me is ‘hay fever’ – one of my favourite sports is tennis however after years of sitting in itchy eye, sneezy purgatory on center court I gave up that activity. I never knew quite why my allergy was so bad in Wimbledon, after all there’s surely not that much pollen there. The courts aren’t exactly fields of long grass, yet for me there is something in Wimbledon Tennis Courts which sets off my hay fever with a vengeance.

So it’s one sport I have to watch at a distance, which is unfortunate really as Wimbledon tickets are usually easier to get than many sports. The reason is that most clubs get an allocation and they are normally distributed to members, Wimbledon also retains some tickets to sell on the gate which I think is a great gesture to allow normal tennis fans in.

The advantage is you can watch all the best matches without the crowds and hassle by watching the wonderful BBC Wimbledon coverage. Now I’ve only ever seen Wimbledon coverage once from another broadcaster and it was truly awful. Of course the matches were fine, but the background, the commentary and the dreadful adverts crammed in whenever there was a minutes gap completely spoilt it for me. The beauty of the BBC coverage is that’s it is so relaxed, drifting effortlessly across the courts with idle musings from tennis legends like John McEnroe to fill in the gaps.

The problem is that although the coverage is all streamed live on the BBC website and through the BBC iPlayer application none of this works from outside the UK. It’s because of the standard geo-restrictions that most of the world’s best media site now employ which restrict access to specific countries. So if you try and connect from anywhere outside the UK you won’t be able to watch the BBC and that includes Wimbledon! But fear not there is a solution, where you can be saved from endless adverts at changeovers and watch the BBC Wimbledon coverage abroad. It’s cheating ever so slightly, but basically hiding your IP address from nosey websites by using a VPN connection is actually a very good idea in this day and age. If that VPN server happens to be in the UK so I can watch the BBC iPlayer online is entirely coincidental !!

An Undemocratic Democracy

Last updated on July 20th, 2017 at 03:26 pm

The United Kingdom, is one of the oldest continuously functioning democracies in the world. There are other contenders but many countries have dipped in and out of democracy over the years. Greece was almost certainly the first to embrace democracy but have dipped in and out over the centuries. Now the title probably rests with somewhere like Iceland, Faroes Islands, Isle of Man or possibly the UK depending on your particular definition.

Whoever the winner, the point is that the UK has been democratic for a centuries and you’d expect them to be pretty good at it. However sometimes a UK citizen can look at the political system and see there’s something very wrong.

Firstly there’s the voting system, it is perfectly possible to get millions of votes without a single representative elected into Parliament. Sometimes there’s a sigh of relief where some extreme party can effectively be ignored despite garnering a sizeable following of voters. Other times it just looks profoundly unfair, consider the Green Part getting over 1/2 million votes and one member of parliament against the SNP (Scottish National Party) who got less than a million and have 31 members. It’s enough to drive you to drink, if you do then you might enjoy this article about the drug Selincro.

There’s lots more examples and outside the two main parties, there’s few political parties who consider the current situation fair. However even within the elected representatives strange undemocratic situations seems to occur with remarkable regularity. Take for example the Brexit situation that currently is causing utter chaos within the United Kingdom. The current Prime Minister Theresa May decided she didn’t have a big enough majority for her preferred version of Brexit so called an election to increase it. Unfortunately this didn’t go quite to plan and now there is complete disarray, with her majority disappearing.

In fact now within the British Parliament, no-one has a majority for anything. The ‘hard Brexit’ people have lost supporters because of a backlash against those who wanted to remain, the ‘remainers’ have lost supporters from a switch of voting from UKIP. The people who sit in the middle are perhaps the only hope, with maybe a drift from both sides reluctantly recognising the futility of the situation. The situation changes daily though, and political students would be advised to invest in a solution like this to watch the changes on the BBC News.

Maybe democracy will triumph in the end but at the moment it’s difficult to see. Many complain that the UK democratic system was sidestepped by using a simplistic referendum in the first place. The issue was a complicated decision with a myriad of options was reduced to a yes/no vote which was completely inadequate. Which is why we find the shambolic situation now with a divided country run by an unpopular leader with similar views.

Further Information: Bypassing region Locks – Video Proxy

Just ‘Lost’ without a Netflix IP Address

Last updated on September 3rd, 2024 at 01:38 pm

Would it be fair to say, that people become more relaxed and accepting of life’s little obstacles as you get older? I think maybe it is, the angry young man turns into something a little bit calmer and relaxed. After all if you’ve survived a few decades you’ve inevitably learn a thing or two – never buy anything from your doorstep or if something’s free then there’s inevitably a catch somewhere.

For me personally, I can accept most little setbacks relatively easily – after all I know they don’t just happen to me and there isn’t much I can do about them. Yet again, utter annoyance and frustration is always there bubbling under the surface. It arose the other week when I and my good lady settled down for an evening’s TV watching , our chosen series the Science Fiction show Lost. Now every body else seems to have watched this about ten years ago, but we’ve only just found it.

Finding the Right Netflix IP Range Address

However when we signed on to Netflix to watch episode 54 out of 70 something, I couldn’t find it. It had completely disappeared from the Netflix subscription, not a word or a warning for those of us who had spent the last few weeks ploughing through this confusing box set. After some internet sleuthing I discovered that it had been removed but only from certain regional variations of Netflix including the UK one I was using. It seemed I had the wrong Netflix IP address, typical.

However it still remained on others including the US version which seems to have much more than the UK version of Netflix. Anyway the cross part soon receded and problem solving was the order of the day – here’s the solution I found in this video, how to spoof ip address to watch Netflix.

It’s actually quite straight forward, to switch between the different versions of Netflix you just need to change your IP address to match the country you need. So for the Canadian version you need a Canadian IP address, for the US one you need a US based address and so on. You can’t actually change your own IP address but you can bounce your connection off something called a VPN server and have a Netflix IP address which obscures your real address from view.

I suppose you could call it Netflix by proxy watching with the help of a third party. So in the video they make a connection to a US based VPN server, which then routes you to the US version of Netflix. It works just as promised and ‘Lost’ is there happily sitting in the US Netflix movie list!

However before you go looking for a super cheap VPN, there’s something you should know about the specific Netflix addresses. Unfortunately although many people switch netflix domains it’s not something the company like and they take a lot of effort in blocking these VPN servers. In reality only about 5% VPN companies have a valid Netflix ip address list, because the company also blocks ‘commercial’ ip addresses. These are addresses which are tagged from a commercial source which most VPN services are from.

Certainly the move has been welcomed by IT departments across the world. No longer do they have to wonder how to block Netflix at work to stop people flooding their network with video. This is because most corporate networks run on commercial based IP addresses which won’t work anymore, so Netflix have effectively saved them a job!

The solution, which you should check with the provider, is to have a ‘residential IP address’ assigned to the VPNs, without this your netflix ip address change will be pointless – it won’t work. It’s the reason why Netflix won’t be accessible from most corporate networks either, a relief for many network administrators who were learning how to block netflix on firewall or external routers. Of course, many administrators have already installed rules to block Netflix IP range too and most content filters have an updated black list of Netflix servers. They are the only company who have done this and it’s been extremely effective, fully expect others to follow suit.

It’s a developing situation though, digital products like Netflix subscription change depending on where you are. Netflix is better than most though because at least your subscription is normally accessible – if you pay for a UK TV license you’ll lose access to all their channels the moment you step outside the UK. Unless of course you invest in a British address that allows you access from anywhere!

Anyway here’s the VPN service which I use – it includes residential IP address ranges that work and are on the approved netflix ip address list.

Try the trial first to see for yourself – 10 Day Trial of Identity Cloaker.

Who’s Been Snooping at Your Email?

There’s been loads in the news recently about countries snooping on each other, it appears we’re all at it. The UK Intelligence services at GCHQ hoovering up all the internet data that crosses the UK, Russians, Chinese and Israeli Intelligence all investing heavily in internet surveillance and the NSA in the US well spying on everyone including their own via Prism.

Many of us now feel that we have to use technology to protect ourselves, a simple VPN can go a long way to blocking those who are spying on us. They have other uses, for example to access region locked sites – watch this video – BBC News Streaming , for an example.

So it’s obviously quite understandable to start thinking about how much of our communications is so easily monitored. Our web traffic at least the majority of it, is I’m afraid very easily accessible by just about anyone in any position of power. At every ISP a detailed list of the majority of your communication traffic is easily picked up. The web’s favorite protocol – HTTP is unfortunately rather lacking in security features and as such web traffic is mostly transmitted in the clear.

So what about email? It’s still one of the most used messaging systems in the world, but how secure is email – read this report? There are two main issues regarding the security of your average email –

1) It’s transported in clear text so everyone can read it.

2) The email is transmitted across the shared infrastructure of the internet.

It means that email is not private at all. Not only is is transmitted in a completely readable format with no encryption at all but this ’open letter’ is delivered by using a network of shared routers, servers and cabling. Anyone at any point can tap into this data a little like GCHQ have tapped into the major fiber connections in the UK.

There are solutions that can make Outlook or Thunderbird a little more secure – one of the major improvements is to encrypt your messages. This means that if done properly only the sender and the recipient would be able to decipher the contents. Look for applications like Hushmail and programs like PGP to offer different solutions to this issue

James Williams

Author of RAI Streaming Estero

Morality in the Digital World

I was talking to a lay preacher the other day, I’ll leave out the particular denomination as that’s not the point of the story. Anyway we were talking about football and related stuff in particular the cost of actually watching out favorite Premiership teams on the TV.

It’s something I have given up the escalating costs of being able to watch football on the TV had started to become a little bit hard to justify for me. My subscription costs to various TV and satellite services was getting close to £100 ($80) a month which is an awful lot of money to pay just for watching a few games of football on the TV. So I bit the bullet and cancelled the lot which was surprisingly less painful than I thought.

It turns out you can listen on the radio for free and watch highlights after the game on TV too, for those ‘must see’ matches there’s always a bar somewhere you can go and watch it on. So for me, it wasn’t a big deal and certainly not worth all the money I was paying out every month. However my preacher friend had a similar thought but ended up taking a different, slightly surprising route than I did.

What he did was buy a media streamer pre-installed with something called Kodi, which is an open source video player which started it’s life on the Xbox. The interesting thing about Kodi however is that supports hundreds of add-ons which can effectively stream copyrighted material directly from the internet. So you can buy a box with Kodi pre-installed and configured which allows access to all of Sky, Virgin and BT’s subscription channels absolutely free.

I have to say I was shocked, a very religious and moral man was effectively stealing these channels without paying for them. It was hardly crime of the century but I wondered if he had considered that it even was theft? It turns out that he didn’t, or at least conveniently pretended he didn’t understand it was theft. After all he’d bought the media box and was simply using it’s facilities to download the programmes that he used to pay for.

This is our world, the digital world where perhaps our morales can be a little more elastic than in the real world. After all would my friend break in to an electronics shop and steal a Sky box, or mug a passer by for money to pay the subscription? Of course he never would even consider doing this. Yet literally millions of law abiding people are using this and similar methods everywhere to download things that they haven’t bought. It doesn’t stop here of course, if there’s a line where is it drawn – is the ex-pat using a VPN to watch iPlayer in Australia a criminal too? It’s much too simple to just consider that theft just involves physical objects – my preacher friend was effectively defrauding SKY of hundreds of pounds a year.

I guess it’s a very subjective issue, copyright infringement could be thought of as a criminal offence or just blurring the rules slightly. It would be harsh to consider all those people who miss British TV and want to watch BBC iPlayer in Ireland or use a Proxy for Netflix access as hard core criminals but it’s easier perhaps to convince yourself no crime is being committed. I think though it’s worth considering the legal and practical implications of finding yourself in court for ‘digital fraud’ or ‘obtaining goods and services by deception’ before using these extremely tempting technical options!

Troubles in Mozambique

The trouble with being an economist who writes about Africa is that it has a habit of making you look stupid very quickly indeed. Even when you try and keep up, I use a VPN like this to regularly connect when I can’t visit, I’m sure I’m not alone having written a piece full of optimism and economic good news on an African country only to see it all start to fall a part only a couple of years later. Africa has a habit of doing this, turning the positive around very quickly usually it has to be said as a result of some pretty incompetent leadership.

Mozambique is the latest African country to seem to snatch economic disasters whilst heading for seeming prosperity. The economy was growing, almost 7% a year for nearly a decade, there was gas discovered off the coast of the country and investors were flocking to the country to help exploit it. Investment was heading for other areas too, attracted by the political stability, $850 million of state sponsored bonds in the Tuna fishing industry was eagerly purchased at exceptionally high yields.

Ironically it looks like the ‘tuna bonds’ were the first mistake leading to a growing scandal that looks like destroying the growth of the last few years. Indeed on January 16th, Mozambique announced to the chagrin of the rest of the world that it would default on it’s international debts.

So why has the government fell into such economic chaos so quickly? There are some mitigating factors, the global fall in commodity prices have played a part and caused a slowdown in growth to a still respectable 3.4% in 2016. However as usual the main reason is the economic mismanagement by the government, if you weren’t a citizen of Mozambique it could almost be seen as laughable.

Take the huge investment in the Tuna fishing industry, the state funded industry unfortunately never caught many fish certainly nowhere near enough to repay the generous yields owed on the supporting investment bonds. This is not actually that surprising because the majority of the investment raised was not spent on fishing boats but rather the sort of boats with guns on the front. The bonds were hastily swapped for government ones when it became clear they were unsupportable yet almost immediately the Government also admitted that it had hidden further loans of $1.4 billion guaranteed. This is a huge amount for a country the size of Mozambique and represents almost 11% of their GDP.

Not surprising this sleight of hand dismayed international organisations with the IMF and other donors freezing their existing support. This is a disaster for a country that despite it’s economic progress still relies heavily on international aid to provide even basic functions and services. Mozambique’s debt now represents over 110% of it’s GDP and some experts thing even this is optimistic, however the country is now engaging in a phase of ‘restructuring’.

This is of course merely another way of saying our debts are out of control and we need to bailed out quickly something that the IMF are probably reluctant to do. Missing payments on existing debts is not the way to attract additional funding for obvious reasons. Few of the existing bondholders are likely to trust the government after recent events and even the IMF has now insisted on a full of audit of all it’s debts. There is also the question of where all the original loans and investments have disappeared to as well.

John Williams

Spoof my IP

The Dangers of Digital Law

Last updated on September 3rd, 2024 at 01:25 pm

What is Digital Law?

Laws are in general supposed to make us safer and more secure, I think most of us would agree. However there are areas where this is not the primary concern and even some where the opposite is true. This is almost certainly the case in one of the older digital based laws created in the US called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) better known as the DCMA Act.

It sounds safe enough at first glance but there’s a huge flaw at the very heart of this legislation which could seriously undermine the safety of the internet. It sounds rather dramatic but it’s certainly a possibility with the increasing reach of devices connected to the internet – particularly the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) . The problem is that all of these devices from smart phones through TVs to toasters and fridges all contain software embedded in them in order to communicate across the internet. Software of course often contains bugs and flaws which can constitute a security risk, in fact there have been many reports of these ‘smart devices’ being used in DDoS attacks.

That’s where the problem lies with the DCMA Act, which contains a law stating that flaws in these devices cannot be disclosed without express permission from the manufacturer of the device. Consider the issue, a security researcher or ethical hacker discovers a security flaw in a device, they cannot release this information legally and the manufacturer is unlikely to want to publish it’s own security problems. What happens is that the flaws remain and don’t get fixed, and almost certainly then get exploited by computer hackers.

DCMA Act

In fact there are situations where DCMA makes it not only illegal to disclose a software fault but also to fix it. There have been test cases, most famously brought by John Deere tractors where it has been stated that it is illegal for owners to attempt to fix their tractors instead being forced to return them to dealers instead. This is because the tractors like most equipment now contain a certain amount of software which control the devices bringing them into the remit of the act.

It’s of considerable concern to all of us, the devices we have bought are not really our property and the issue is extending to all sorts of situations. We can’t use third party disks or cartridges in printers and game consoles because the manufacturer controls the software and access to that device even after we’ve bought it. With digital services it’s even more extreme with media giants like Netflix enforcing blocks on proxies and VPNs as described in this article – The Great Netflix VPN Ban.

It’s a dream come to true for the manufacturers who are able to implement specific profit maximizing business models which are extremely restrictive to the end owners. Control of the device is effectively kept with people who created it not with the people who bought it. Don’t think you can do what you like with that HP printer, because you can’t the law says so!

Summary of the DCMA Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, is a significant piece of legislation in the United States that addresses copyright issues in the digital environment. It aims to update copyright law for the internet age by providing tools for copyright owners to protect their works online while also balancing the rights of users and internet service providers (ISPs). The DMCA includes provisions that make it illegal to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) technologies and establishes a “safe harbor” for ISPs, protecting them from liability for copyright infringement committed by their users, provided they follow specific procedures for handling takedown notices. The act has played a crucial role in shaping how copyright is enforced on the internet and has influenced global copyright law discussions.