ISP is Limiting your Download Speed ?

ISP is Limiting your Download Speed ?

Sometimes speed seems to go down while you are watching videos on YouTube or are trying to download files through a torrent client, even though you have a fairly good Internet connection at home and regular websites load pretty quickly in your browser.

If you observe such a speed pattern quite frequently, chances are that your ISP could be rate limiting your traffic for certain bandwidth intensive operations. To give you an example, if your regular download speed is 100 kB/s, YouTube videos could be streaming at a speed of 30 kB/s due to rate limiting by the ISP.

Is your ISP is limiting your download speeds?



You can run the Glasnost test in your browser to determine whether or not your ISP is following any such tactic to manipulate your download speeds for specific sites.

The test uses a Java applet to compare your regular download speed against the speed at which Flash videos get streamed to your system. Other than videos, it can also compare the download speed for email attachments (via POP and IMAP), normal HTTP based file transfers, torrents and binary downloads from Usenet servers.

You should consider running these tests at different times of the day since some ISPs may be limiting speeds only during peak hours.

Note: Check & Stop any other downloads that might be running in the background for more accurate results


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How Big Really

How Big Really

It often becomes a bit easy for us to visualize the size of an area if it is shown relative to something that we are already aware of.

Based on this idea, BBC has launched a new site called Dimensions where you can visualize the scale of important historical places and events by overlaying them on a map of a location that you are already familiar with.



For instance, you can set your city as the starting point for the Great Wall of China to understand how massive it is. Or if you wish to know how much distance did the astronauts walk when they first landed on the moon, simply overlay that area to some familiar neighborhood.

There’s a map of Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan where Laden was thought to be hiding sometime. Once you see that area relative to your own location, you suddenly realize how big it is.

Note: Dimensions is a prototype built by BERG for the BBC. We make no guarantee as to its accuracy, reliability or performance.


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Backup Gmail Inbox Online

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk.


Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?

If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:

Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked, you will still have access to all your previous emails.

Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.

Reason #3 – If the Gmail service goes down, you will still be able to read your older emails. Gmail outage won’t affect work.


Backup your Gmail Messages Online

There are three services that can help you automatically backup your Gmail (and Google Apps) email accounts online.



The first and most obvious choice is Gmail. Create a new Gmail account and under Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Check mail using POP3 –> Add POP3 email account, enter the email address of your main Gmail account that you want to backup.

Within an hour or so, the online mail fetcher program will pull messages from your main Gmail account and will copy them to your new “backup” account. In my limited testing, I found that Gmail’s mail fetcher left all the messages that were either “read” or have been previously downloaded by another POP3 client so it’s not “true backup.”

That brings us to another alternative – copy your Gmail mailbox to Windows Live Hotmail. While you can add a Gmail account to Hotmail using POP3 (just like Gmail’s mail fetcher), there’s a much better and reliable option out there for copying emails from Gmail into Hotmail and it’s called TrueSwitch.



Setup a new Hotmail account and TrueSwitch, an awesome web-based email account migration service, will copy all your emails and attachments from Gmail to your new Hotmail address. If you have a relatively large Gmail Inbox, the backup process might take up to 24 hours but you’ll get an email as soon as the transfer is complete.

Like Gmail, Hotmail too offers “expanding” storage so it can possibly fit your large Google inbox as well. You can then add your Gmail address to Hotmail (click “Add an email account” in the sidebar) and this will ensure that new messages that land in your Gmail inbox in the future are also saved in Hotmail.

That said, both the services discussed above have one common drawback – they’ll always backup your entire Gmail mailbox and you cannot limit the backup process to a specific set of folders (or labels in Gmail). So if you have a fairly large mailbox and don’t want to backup each and every Gmail folder (or label), try Backupify.



Backupify, can backup your online accounts (including Gmail) to Amazon S3 and a unique point about Backupify is that it lets you specify labels that should be included in the backup process. The messages are stored in the cloud as EML files that you can view inside Outlook or, you can change the .eml extension to .mht, and read the file inside IE.

Backupify supports XOauth so you can add your Gmail account to the service without having to share your Google Account credentials. The advantage is that Backupify will scan your selected mailbox folders every single day for new emails and will archive them automatically.


Note: Try TrueSwitch,Backupify & other 3rd party tools at your own risk.
CosmoCyber is not responsible, if your Gmail account is compromised.


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Undo Send

Undo “Send” in Gmail

Note: The feature is hidden from most users who don’t know where to look, so here’s a quick guide to avoiding social and workplace faux pas with the click of a button. Be aware that the feature is part of Gmail Labs, though. That means it’s still in testing and it might not always work as intended - CosmoCyber

Since the Undo Send feature is part of Gmail Labs, you’ll have to navigate to the Gmail Labs page to activate it. Load up Gmail (Gmail) and look in the top-right corner of the page. Between your e-mail address and Settings you’ll see the green Labs icon.



Find "Undo Send" among the list. (Picture Below)



Customize Undo Send’s Duration

By default, Gmail gives you a 10-second window of time in which you may undo a sent e-mail. You can change that to five, 20 or 30 seconds by going to Settings.



How it Works ?

Write and Send Your E-mail



Now you have either five, 10, 20 or 30 seconds to undo your sent e-mail, depending on what you selected under Settings.

As soon as you hit Send, a subtle line of text will appear above your Inbox saying “Your message has been sent.” It will be accompanied by a few extra options. Among them is “Undo.” Click that within the allotted time and your faux pas will be prevented.

Click the “Undo” Button After You Send



“Sending Has Been Undone”
You’ll immediately be taken back to the e-mail composition page, and your e-mail will be in draft form, unsent and ready for further editing.




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