BolehVPN News/Status/Fun

For the benefit of you Malaysian Blackberry Torch users, I have uploaded the Blackberry Torch latest leaked OS. Please note that this version does not have EastAsian language pack.

I have provided a temporary download link for you South East Asian guys who don’t want to go through Hotfile, Megaupload etc. Depending on bandwidth circumstances, I may take this link off at any time.

First Impressions:

OS took a few reboots before it started working well. (I did two reboots)

1. Browser feels faster. Compared it to a Samsung Galaxy S running Darky ROM 9.1 and it fell only slightly behind when fully loading Engadget (though the Samsung was faster to display content while it was loading).
2. OS feels much snappier compared to 337 build
3. Camera has autofocus now and tells you when it has focused
4. Still some picture lag when zooming into pictures in the Gallery
5. Holds on to the 3G signal better

There will be maintenance works carried out on the SEA-ME-WE-4 submarine cable in the 2nd week of February and the work is expected to complete within 1 week. During this time, they may be slightly slower access to European locations if you’re in SE Asia.

The announcement is as follows from Business Video News

AMMAN – Internet users in the Kingdom are likely to witness a “slight” slowdown in connectivity speed in mid-February due to maintenance work on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, according to the Jordan Telecom Group (JTG).

“Maintenance of the optic fibre submarine cable system will start during the second week of February. No major disruptions are expected, but there is a possibility that Internet speed will slow down,” Raslan Diranieh, chief financial officer of the JTG, told The Jordan Times over the phone yesterday.

He added that Jordan, along with other countries in the region, will be affected by maintenance work on the cable, which links South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and the Middle East with terminal stations in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

Work on the cable is scheduled to last for one week, according to Diranieh, who noted that the JTG already has plans in place to move the traffic on the cable to other cables, as the JTG relies on five routes for Internet connectivity and international calls.

The $500 million SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system spans approximately 20,000 kilometres, comprising the main backbone across the Eastern and Western worlds plus the extension links in various countries, according to the project’s website.

Last week, Reliance Globalcom, a division of Reliance Communications, conducted maintenance work on the FLAG Europe Asia undersea fibre-optic cable. The maintenance, which lasted for eight hours, had no impact on international calls or Internet services, Diranieh said.

Our ordering site is back up. However the security certificate has expired and we’re in the process of renewing it. The slight delay is due to them requiring us to verify certain company details with the certification body which involves the provision of documents. However it is safe to still order through the site despite the certificate error until we renew it. Just confirm the security exception for now and ordering should be still processed as per normal.

Currently users are reporting that despite the apparent ‘fix’ on the Utorrent Beta for the freezing on the Socks proxy, the program still freezes after a while. We have reported this to uTorrent developers for their feedback on this. For now, the recommended version for uTorrent is 2.04.

UPDATE: SSL certificate has been renewed and a TrustLogo installed to ensure your security!

The ordering system is currently temporarily down as the Malaysian datacentre it’s hosted in seems to be having some issues.

We will update you once it is back up and we apologize for the inconvenience.

The issues that some people were facing with uTorrent and our PublicTracker/PrivateTracker configurations which caused uTorrent to freeze has been traced down to a bug in the uTorrent code which we believe to have been fixed in the latest Beta release.

We haven’t had the opportunity to test this out yet so appreciate customer feedback on this!

You can download the latest beta here.

Changelog:

– 2011-01-19: Version 2.2.1 beta (build 24217)
- Fix: fixed gui.graph_overhead
- Change: limit cache size to 2000 MB (for 32 bit builds)
- Fix: attempt at fixing disappearing systray icon
- Fix: Copy and paste in File list view fixed. (ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-V)
- Fix: don’t attempt to open a file if it doesn’t exist (caused association dialog to appear)
- Change: only apply the port > 1023 for outgoing connection restriction for peers only hear about through the DHT
- Fix: back-ported proper support for disabling udp trackers from 3.0
- Fix: fix bug in UDP socks5 support which would cause infinite loops
- Fix: Use system call to open containing folder instead of launching explorer.exe (when available)
- Fix: Don’t connect to ports < 1024 when no-connect-to-services is enabled (which it is by default)
- Fix: privacy checkbox in general settings would have multiline text
- Change: add port 80 and 443 to the default port block list

Just a quick note for those of you considering an Alienware M11x.

It’s an awesome system, hands down, portable, long battery life and heck it plays games! It’s also reasonably affordable especially considering it is one of the few portables that can play games and it’s still much cheaper than a MacBook Pro (which has a weaker graphics card as well).

However there is a serious drawback is in its LCD hinge construction where it suffers fatigue pretty quickly and breaks. I had first hand experience of this myself where my LCD screen had to be replaced just because of the broken hinge after a few months of use.

Dell has posted that they are aware of the problem and are working on a fix but however there’s also this post from a Dell rep:

I heard from my friend that they got the hinge problem solved.
* That is true for the M11x-R3 but false for the M11x-R1 and M11x-R2. We are still working on the solution. When it is resolved, I will let you all know. No, I do not know when the R3 will be available nor do I know its specifications.

Now the R3 (or Revision 3) is not even announced so it’s rather funny that they fixed an issue on an unreleased product while the existing R1s and R2s remain without a resolution. I have a feeling it’s more an issue of the cost of product recalls and rectifications rather than an actual technical issue. Further evidence to this shows that the ‘home’ fix isn’t difficult and it points to a PLASTIC screw support which wears out in this post.

My advice? Wait it out and wait for R3.

Several of our customers using the PrivateTracker/PublicTracker function have been experiencing issues with uTorrent 2.2 where the torrent client freezes and there’s high CPU usage when being used in conjunction with certain socks 5 servers.

The uTorrent developers have identified the problem and will be releasing a bug fix in their next build of uTorrent 2.2.1. This is NOT available yet so hang tight!

The usage of uTorrent 2.2 should also improve privacy and prevent traffic from leaking out of the VPN as well which was a bug in previous versions of uTorrent.

We are aware that BolehRoute servers are experiencing slot congestion (not bandwidth congestion) at certain peak periods and are looking to expand our capacity.

This may take a while as the unique IPs that are required for the BolehRoute servers are hard to negotiate for.

We will keep you posted but rest assured that we’re working on it.

We are in the process of setting up a new seedbox server and are inviting any of our current seedbox subscribers to migrate over to balance out load.

The server is located in the same location as Colossus (Luxembourg).

We are looking to move over at max 10 users so it’s first come first serve. Please drop us a mail at sales [at] bolehvpn.net should you be interested in migrating over.

This will bring our total seedbox server numbers to 4. Thank you for the kind support all these years!

Thank you for your patience, the bug with the panel activation system has been rectified and you may activate your accounts now.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

And now I’m going to drink!