Would you prefer that important data like information about yourself, account numbers, personal documents and the like are accessible all the time from everyone who has access to your computer or that this data is only available to someone with special access ? I would like to give details on an easy way to store your data safely on your computer without wasting lots of time. It may be safer keeping the data in a safe in your appartement but this is not really practicable.

A better way would be to use some sort of encryption to make it (almost) impossible for everyone except you to access those files. The process to encrypt files is easy and can be followed by everyone, even someone who does not have lots of experience with computers. Here is what you need:

continue reading "How to build a data safe"

One phenomenon can be observed every year when the summer begins. Many users report problems with their computers who behave strangely or even reboot unexpectedly. If you experienced this once you might already know what is causing this behaviour. Pc components become warmer than usual because the air is hotter which can lead to reboots and even damaged components.

You can do a few things that check the temperatures and warn you if it reaches a critical degree. Speedfan is one of that programs that does exactly this. It checks all temperature sensors, most important are the cpu temperature and the hard drive temperature. The tool is also able to manage all fans of your computer, it can throttle them to make them less noisy or speed them up to cool the air in a better way.

continue reading "Practical Tips to Decrease the Temperature of your Computer"

P2P is in the news, every day. You see organizations like the RIAA hunting down filesharers, you read about trojans and virii that are spread through P2P networks. Everything seems rather risky at the moment. A new player is emerging from the shadows which is using a very old communication system, the Usenet. You might know a part of the usenet if you ever read something from google groups. Google Groups is an archive of the part of the usenet that looks similar to bulletin boards.

But there is a hidden side, a side that many never heard about: The binary side. The usenet holds also a large binary archive which is growing by 2800 gigabytes daily. Yes, you read that right, 2,8 Terrabyte of files every day. All files (and the discussion as well) are stored in groups, like alt.binaries.dvd or alt.binaries.mp3. You can take a look at some of the files that are stored on the usenet by visiting either newzbin.com or yabse.com. The first lists user submissions in categories like movies, games and mp3, the second is a usenet search engine. Just enter a search term and it will search many groups for matches. If it finds matches you are able to download them, if you have a usenet account and a program that is able to download such files.

continue reading "Newsgroups, the ultimate P2P alternative."

Phishing is a popular method to capture personal data such as passwords, transaction numbers and credit card details. The company I´am working with locks several user accounts each day to prevent harm done to them due to phishing. It normally starts with an email asking you to update your profile, to download a security update or a email that reveals that you are the highest bidder of an eBay auction (that you do not know about).

To make this work they have to capture your data on one of their servers. A link is always provided in the email which looks pretty normal, e.g. http://www.ebay.com/. You might know that the html link tag is able to provide a link and a text that is shown instead of the link. Those criminals use this to their advantage showing ebay.com and directing the user to a different location.

continue reading "Anti-Phishing Tips"

I´am not using bittorrent that often anymore but it is still a great way of transfering large files. You see less complaints of people about low download speeds but certainly there are some that are having troubles downloading at a great speed. This can be of course torrent related, if you don´t have many seeders or only seeders with low upload speeds you will experience a slow download.

There are still some settings that are worth tweaking to make sure that the settings from your side are perfect for full speed if the torrent provides that speed. Optimize your bittorrent download speed explains not only basic settings but also advanced ones that help improve the download speed. The article not only provides the numbers but explains them and the reasoning behind. This is great. Let us take a look at the parameters:

continue reading "Speed up your torrent downloads"