Anyway, I’m reading an article on the register about it and after I’d finished I noticed that the good fellows at #Anonymous had closed down what was described as a “hidden child abuse hub” in around Oct2011 – now I’m not into child abuse hubs, but this once again intrigued me as to what these articles meant by these “hidden” resources.. They cant simply mean passworded sites as the servers that hosted these sites would be located and shut down?

So after a bit more digging I find another article talking about the “Hidden Wiki” and something called the Tor network. A few minutes later I had installed it, opened it, clicked a few links and ended on a directory that contained links to possibly some of the most disturbing things i have ever seen in my life – all on domain extensions that when trying to access on the normal Internet simply present you with a 404 page.

The idea behind the Tor network is basically an entire anonymous Internet only accessible when you connect to their network, where the source of websites, and the identity of the people browsing them cant be traced – so you can basically talk about everything and anything and get away with it – and it doesn’t take you long to see who mostly inhabits this underworld – lowlifes, peado’s and no doubt terrorists and everything in-between…

Like most normal people, until i started reading into it I didn’t know this world existed – and according to sources it is potentially 400/500 times BIGGER than the commonly defined world wide web. That is a worrying thought, is it not?

To conclude, I’m all up for an open, free and anonymous Internet but nothing should ever be 100% unrestricted as it ends up being used by child abusers and the likes to fuel their sick desires – please, Tor Police – do something about the horrible stuff on there… That’s not why you set the Tor network up, is it?

Windows 7 is the best windows OS to date – it goes on most systems with ease and as long as your system is supported by windows 7 you simply have to slam the files on and it tends to do the rest itsself.

However – for some reason my beloved Sony Vaio VGN AR88E seems to be one of the few systems that has a few issues with windows 7, specifically the 64bit version. Actually that statement is wrong, its actually the NVIDIA 8400M GT grpahics card that has the issues but rest assured there is a workaround to get the NVIDIA 8400M GT working with windows 7 64bit – its not for the feint hearted but it works!

NB: The out-the-box installation of windows 7 on this vaio WILL install some drivers that will make the PC seem like its working fine, but plug another monitor in (or two more in my case) and you wont get very far….

Step 1 – Download the official, latest version of the drivers from the NVIDEA website: http://uk.geforce.com/drivers (i found i had to manually search for them)

Step 2 – Run the downloaded file, it will extract a load of files to your C:\ – go to My Computer, double click on C:\ and then carry on until you are (roughly) in this directory;

C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\296.10\WinVista_Win7_64\

Step 3 – Find your graphics card ID by right clicking on “Computer” in your start menu, then clicking properties. When the window opens click on “Device Manager” on the left and then locate the “Display Adapters” option, double click to reveal what will probably be labelled as a “Standard VGA Controller” or something like that.

Step 4 – Right click and click proiperties on the Display Adapter and then click on the “Details” tab, and in the dropdown menu find “Hardware ID” then click on it.

Step 5 – Make a note of the top “Value”, it will look something like this;

Step 6 – Find a file called NVMT.INF and open it – for me it was inside a zip file called additional_infs.zip.

Step 7 – Search for your graphics card, mine is the GeForce 8400M GT and it was set out like this;

NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT”

Step 8 – Search for [NVIDIA_SetA_Devices.NTamd64.6.1] and for [NVIDIA_SetA_Devices.NTamd64.6.1]

The first search will bring you to a list where you will see this;

%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01% = Section005, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_55841991
%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.02% = Section007, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_88971033

Step 9 – Copy the last line, and duplicate it;

%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01% = Section005, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_55841991
%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.02% = Section007, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_88971033
%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.02% = Section007, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_88971033

Step 10 –  Change the bold bits, the first to 03, the second to 11 (dont know why, the guide i read said to) and the 3rd bit to your hardware ID (so in my case 9016104D)

Do the same for the second search above except put 12 instead of 11.

Step 11 – Search for Strings and find your graphics card again in the list;

NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT”
NVIDIA_DEV.0426.02 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT ”

Step 12 – Duplicate the last line as follows;

NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT”
NVIDIA_DEV.0426.02 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT ”
NVIDIA_DEV.0426.03 = “NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT (Sony Vaio) ”

Save all the changes and you should now be able to install official drivers to your Sony Vaio.

Things change and some systems may vary – if you follow these steps and it doesn’t work please don’t bitch and moan to me, try some other stuff and you will get there eventually.

At work, we do something called SEO and we’ve just started doing what we call Reputation Management which is basically the reverse of SEO – they both use similar techniques and are both becoming something we are being asked more and more for by our customers.

Anyway……. a few years ago i was watching the MoBo awards, and Kelly Rowland and David Guetta performed their track “When love takes over” live to the crowd and to everyone watching at home on TV.

From the word go, the lyrics were off – she started in the wrong place and basically totally screwed up the first part of the song… Some would say that she forgot her lyrics… Some may say there was a sound problem – either way it didn’t paint a good picture of the singer as (IIRC) she was just starting out her solo career (or at least its the first time i’d heard from her since DC)

A year or so later i decided to try and find the video as a friend of mine didn’t believe me that it happened…. And i couldn’t find.. anything! At the time i had forgotten what live performance she had sung at when she’d fluffed the lyrics – i actually thought it was an MTV Music Awards, but despite that we could not find a video that proved it! There was no talk of it on forums, blogs…. it was like someone had been paid to completely remove it from the Internet. I was using terms like kelly rowland forgot lyrics and many, many variations of that… still found nothing.

The track then came on the radio this morning – and as normal it set me off looking for the proof when i happened to change my search keywords to something (as a stab in the dark) and got lucky… i found this website.

The website confirmed my statement;

Kelly Rowland recently tried to sing at the MOBO awards in Glasgow, England. The former Destiny’s Child singer momentarily stopped at the beginning of her performance of the track – a collaboration with David Guetta.

And there was an embedded video…. :O

Ok, so the plot is definitely thickening and it is looking more and more like someone has been actively removing traces of this happening from the web! However, the site I found did enlighten me to the name of the event where she messed up – it was the MoBo’s in 2009 – this then lead me into a corner of YouTube lined with all sorts of dodgy videos of the event and her performance…. but they all have one thing in common..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuENNqZEQzU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaqFtCoSpgc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGq9-zG5VL4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMaqBnxNbfM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-Z7VXlcoo

They are all the same performance – but either the sound is dodgy, they start just after the fail, OR they seem to have been edited to kind of mask the error – i have alarm bells ringing here.. It now seems that not only has someone cleverly concealed a lot of this info from the net – they seem to have edited/scrambled some of these videos to further hide her screw-up!

The only actual video that i found that 100% truly shows the singer messing up is this one;

http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhP0RHG51aYnaSUCt7

Which happens to be one of the only decent videos i could find that was not on youtube!

So whats the deal then, Google? Have Miss Rowlands People paid you to block or “filter” anyone searching for this? Can money really buy you that kinda power? Or have some Rep Management peeps been paid a ton of cash to work like the clappers to get it removed from the net as best they can?

You hear about people trying to cover stuff up all the time now, injunctions and all that shite –  but this happened a few years ago, when the Internet was a bit younger and things like Internet censorship were things only the paranoid web-geeks amongst us used to worry about.

This kinda thing also makes me really angry – as if this is something that has been done by Google to protect her “image” or whatever, then why couldnt the same have been done for Ruth Jeffreys as she was definitely more deserving of such treatment. Even after the TV show about Ruths problems aired, you could still find pics of her! (very easily too, although they do seem to mostly be gone now)

So in a nutshell i guess im trying to say that sometimes people can talk dirt about you online, and if this is an incorrect statement and its causing damage to you or your brand, then people like us can help get it pushed so far down google its like it never existed – but if you are a rich celeb and mess up your lyrics live on stage, its not fair that you can just ring google and pay a shed load of cash to remove it.