Best wishes for your birthday Shane, from everyone at TECHTOAD.COM. We hope you have a fantastic day!

Best wishes for your birthday Marcus, from everyone at TECHTOAD.COM. We hope you have a fantastic day!

Click here to find out How To Remove a Virus from a Windows Computer on our Tutorials page!

So you may have heard in the news last week that one of the world's biggest free file sharing websites, Mega Upload was shut down by US agencies for breach of piracy laws.

Here at techtoad.com, we feel that the service that Mega Upload was providing was more than a tool for piracy. Unfortunately, the service was abused by people uploading illegal or copyrighted material, and maybe Mega Upload didn't take enough measures to prevent that - but it still stands that an instant Upload and Download service is a very useful tool.

If you need to send a large file to somebody and it's too large to send via email, a file sharing site like Mega Upload is a perfect soloution. Upload the large file, send the download link inside an email - simple. Same goes for sending a large file to a large number of recpients, it's much quicker to only upload the file once and have the recipients download it from the same location.

There are numerous advantages to this service, and the email example is just one of them - to name a few others, you might need to make a file publicly available for a short period of time, you might need to use a file sharing service simply to transfer a file from one device to another if you have no other means of doing so.

It's not all bad news though, although Mega Upload have been shut down, there are still a number of sites that offer a similar service.
We would have recommend the Free Public Sharing Bay otherwise known as FPSBay.com - it was originally developed by our team and it was one of the only file sharing sites on the net that allowed you to upload an unlimited number of files (up to 1GB each) without having to register or sign in. There was no requirement to register or sign in to download the files either. The best part, it was a totally FREE service. With a primary server based in a London datacentre, and a number of servers in Europe which help to load-balance the site and make room for all the uploaded files - it really was one of the best services available. Unfortunately, due to the fact that Mega Upload was one of the major file sharing sites, after only a few days of being shut down, FPSBay.com was overloaded, peaking at it's highest volume of internet traffic since it's launch - 4.1TB of data was uploaded and a whopping 17.8TB of data downloaded over just 3 days. Unfortunately, until the servers are upgraded, the site is no longer able to function due to lack of server resources.

TECHTOAD.COM LTD does not endorse, promote or encourage sharing of illegal, immoral or copyrighted content.

It's our birthday here at TECHTOAD.COM! You may not know that 'TECHTOAD.COM' was originally launched by Kirk Saywell on January 22nd, 2006. At the beginning of the year, 'TECHTOAD.COM' became an incorperated company. Today we celebrate 6 years of running and would like to thank the team for all their hard work, and our visitors for keeping the site alive. Have a great day everybody!

A quick bulletin for our local readers, Nexus Technology & Media Ltd in Colchester are now offering iPhone repairs on the 3G, 3GS, 4 and 4S models. Go in-store or call 01206 564 124 for quotations and more information.

Check out the Advantages and Disadvantages of Solid State Drives on our Articles page!

In celebration of our famous "Quote of the Week", we have decided to introduce a "Quote of the Year". Our team will review the TECHTOAD.COM quotes each week, and if they think it's really good, they will nominate it for the "Quote of the Year". At the end of 2012, on Monday 31st December, Kirk Saywell (the director and founder of TECHTOAD.COM) will decide the best quote out of those nominated and will announce the winner and winning quote on the News page.

Today, many websites are following the lead of Wikipedia and operating a blackout in protest against the proposed SOPA & PIPA incentives by the US Government.

TECHTOAD.COM will remain online, but we would like to alert our readers to these proposed acts.

Here are some links with useful information:

• Main Wikipedia article

• Wikipedia article about the blackout

• Why SOPA Is Dangerous

• Anti-SOPA petition

• Vimeo video explaining ProtectIP

Extracts from mashable.com that help understand what this means for YOU:

If the AG chooses to take action against a site (either against the operator, if they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, or against the site itself if no one under U.S. jurisdiction can be found), then a subsequent court order would require the following:

• Internet service providers will be required to block your access to the site (section 102(c)(2)(A)(i)) within five days.
• Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) will be forced to remove all references to the offending sites from their indexes (section 102(c)(2)(B)).
• Ad providers (Google AdSense, Federated Media, etc.) will be required to stop providing ad service to the site.
• Payment providers (PayPal, Visa, etc.) will be required to terminate service to the site.

Any site that allows users to post content is “primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.” The site doesn’t have to be clearly designed for the purpose of copyright violation; it only has to provide functionality that can be used to enable copyright violation.

This means that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be “Internet sites…dedicated to theft of U.S. property,” under SOPA’s definition. Simply providing a feature that would make it possible for someone to commit copyright infringement or circumvention (see: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) is enough to get your entire site branded as an infringing site.