One of the issues that you may have when searching for friends, family or people online is that you will get all sorts of results. Depending on the person’s Internet activities and popularity on the Internet, you may get some, none or a lot of results about that person on the first pages of the [...]

If you are a Windows user you probably came upon quite a few files in the past that you wanted to delete but could not. There are lots of reasons why you may not be able to delete a file in the operating system; from in-use files locked by a process that is still running, [...]

HijackThis back in the days was a sophisticated tool to scan a Windows system for traces of malicious software. Unlike conventional antivirus software which relied on signature databases and heuristics to identify malware, HijackThis concentrated on listing items in known malware locations. Included here were the computer’s startup locations and important Registry keys, which were [...]

Breaking News: Adobe just made an announcement on the official Air and Flash Player Team Blog that changes are coming to Flash Player on Linux. The company has partnered up with Google to “develop a single modern API for hosting plugins within the browser”. PPAPI (code-named Pepper), adds a layer between the browser and underlying [...]

Animated Gifs are still popular on today’s Internet, albeit for different purposes. Back in the beginning days of the public Internet, webmasters used them to add animated contents to their websites. This soon died out when they realized that repeating ten second animates had a damaging effect to their website’s reputation. Today, animated gifs are [...]

Scroogle was one of the sites that came up occasionally here on Ghacks as an alternative to Google Search. It basically provided access to Google Search results through a proxy to protect the privacy of its users. In this regard, it was more of a Google proxy than a search engine. Daniel Brandt, the creator [...]

This week, Google was found out to have been bypassing privacy settings in both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari web browsers, as Martin reported here.  In a statement on their blog, the Corporate Vice-President of IE blogged “IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site [...]

There may be times where you do not have the time to pay attention to your Android phone. This can be at work where you may not be allowed to have your phone out in the open, or with you at all, or in situations where you are working with noise-cancelling headsets that would, well, [...]

I originally wanted to post a review of the image effect editor Vampix, but when I tried to install the software, I stumbled upon something else. The program setup did not include one, two, three or even four third party software offers. No, it included a total of five of them all neatly packaged in [...]

A lot of users rely on the popular uTorrent Bittorrent client when it comes to downloading files with the help of torrents from the Internet. In past years, things have changed when it comes to that client. It first was purchased by Bittorrent, and then started to integrate features into the client that were not [...]

The creation of torrent files has become a lot easier in recent years. All it takes today is to drop the files you want to share in a compatible program to create the torrent. The popular Bittorrent client uTorrent offers these capability for instance. But that creates just the torrent without any descriptions or information. [...]

It’s been delayed and delayed further, but despite no official confirmation from RIM the long-anticipated version 2 of the company’s QNX operating system for the Blackberry Playbook is due to be released today.  AMong the features on offer are native email and calendar apps, something that’s taken for granted with any other tablet operating system.  [...]

The popular video hosting site YouTube up until now kept a log of all of the videos that you watched on the site while logged in to your YouTube or Google account. YouTube knows about all the videos that you watched on the site while logged in to the account. The feature’s name could cause [...]

The Wall Street Journal a few days ago described how Google and other advertising companies bypassed a user privacy feature of Apple’s Safari browser to drop “ad-tracking cookies on [..] Safari users”. Safari by default blocks third party cookies, which are often used by advertising companies to track users on the Internet. These cookies are [...]

There are not many Windows 8 features that excite me as much as the planned integration of Microsoft’s online storage and document editing service SkyDrive in the operating system. A new blog post over at the Building Windows 8 blog reveals how the Redmond company intents to integrate SkyDrive into the Windows operating system. The [...]

Microsoft initially planned to end support for some Windows Vista versions, Windows Home Basic and Ultimate for example, in April 2012. The effect would have been devastating for customers running those editions of the operating systems, as they would not receive patches, both normal and security related, anymore after that date. It would also mean [...]

Bundling software with third party offers to generate revenue is one of the ways that software development companies and developers make money. The system has its advantages if you look at it from a neutral point of view. Instead of going the commercial route, developers can offer their programs for free. That’s good for users [...]

Mozilla publishes release logs whenever a new version of the Firefox web browser gets released. These logs detail the most prominent changes and feature additions, but not everything that has happened in the background. There are also situations where no log is published, for instance when the beta, aurora or nightly builds get updated. How [...]

Like it or not, it would appear that the tablet-ification of our desktop operating systems is inevitable.  Setting aside the new Metro interface that will take the main focus of Windows 8, Apple are slowly creeping more tablet features into OS X and even Canonical are getting in on the act with their Unity interface for [...]

Can websites find out if you are logged into Facebook, Twitter or Google+? That’s what Tom Anthony wanted to find out. If third party websites could, it could be used for different purposes, from user tracking to optimizing the websites services for the networks the user is logged in. Facebook for instance provides an API [...]

Extensions are little helper programs that make life on the Internet a tad more comfortable for the user. Some change the way we access information on the Internet, others add extra features and functionality to a website, and others help you stay safe and secure online. Most Internet users who use extensions never bother to [...]

Windows keeps a record of all USB devices that have been connected to the computer in the past. The records are stored in the Windows Registry, and programs like USB Deview display them directly in their interface. Sometimes you may want to erase information about devices that have been connected to the PC in the [...]

I noticed yesterday that the popular live streaming software Sopcast was using all of my computer’s upload bandwidth. The program uses P2P technologies to distribute the live stream to all connected users, just like the newly announced Bittorrent Live does. Using all of my computer’s upload speed, 10 Mbit in total, put a lot of [...]

The cloud, that’s where every big tech company under the sun is heading to. Cloud storage recently came into focus again with rumors that Google would launch their long awaited Google Drive service in the near future. Microsoft has been one step ahead of Google with SkyDrive, the company’s cloud hosting, document management and media [...]

We have followed the latest VLC development ever since Videolan pushed the first build of the media player’s new version to the public ftp server. It did not take long after that initial release before the first release candidate build was made available. The developers today have released the final version of the media player. [...]

If you are monitoring your network traffic closely you may have noticed that the Google Chrome web browser and its Open Source counterpart Chromium are both trying to connect to three random ten letter words on start up. For most users, it is not clear why the browser is making those connections, and some have [...]

It happens that you stumble upon a site where images are posted that are simply to small to make out all of the details. Some let you view a larger version of the image when you click on it, while others do not offer larger versions of the images at all. This can be a [...]

I’m not a big fan of applications that scan a system for hardware driver updates, as it can happen that updates are suggested that are either not compatible with the installed hardware, or not beneficial to the system. These programs have their purpose, but only for users who care to double-check suggested driver updates before [...]

With the Windows 8 beta out next week and getting all the attention especially with it’s integration of the company’s Kinect technology, the rest of Microsoft’s product line-up has taken a back seat in the eyes of the public and businesses.  It is a very extensive line-up though including Hotmail, SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, Office [...]

Remember Command & Conquer Renegade? The CnC spin-off that turned the Command & Conquer universe into a first and third person shooter? The game received an average rating of 75% according to Metacritic, a solid but not good rating. The single player mode was heavily criticized for being cramped and scripted. Renegade X was an [...]

Movie subtitles repositories are popular sites on the Internet, as they provide users with movie subtitles in many different languages. This can be useful if you got hold of a movie in a language that you do not understand for instance, if you want subtitles displayed to learn a language, or if you are hearing [...]

Facebook fairly recently made a change to Facebook Chat that is irritating many users of the site. The chat interface, displayed in the lower right corner of the screen is now not only listing contacts who are online, but also those who are not. To make matters worse, online and offline friends are mixed in [...]

Unless you hadn’t noticed, Microsoft are gearing up for the release of the Windows 8 (beta) Consumer Preview publicly in just over a week, but others, such as official beta testers and MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers will no doubt get it a week before as happened with Windows 7.  We’re now in the last [...]

When you try to download a file from the popular file hosting site Rapidshare lately, you may have noticed that the speed of transfer has dropped significantly in comparison to previous downloads you made. This change apparently affects free users, that is users who are not logged into the service or users with free accounts, [...]

Mozilla has just released Firefox 10.0.2 to the public, the third release in less than a month’s time (you can read up on Firefox 10 and Firefox 10.0.1 by following the posted links). The previous update fixed several crash related issues that affected a high number of Firefox users. Firefox 10.0.2 is a security update [...]

Social networking sites may use the contents that you post on their sites in a variety of ways. They may sell them to advertisers, use them to personalize advertising on their sites, may report them to local authorities or ban your account. Encrypt Facebook is a new Google Chrome extension that offers an ingenious way [...]

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that I’m using as my primary information retrieval tool on the Internet, has just marked an all new high yesterday. For the first time ever since the search engine opened its doors, it received more than 1 million direct search queries. These are generated by direct user requests. Api requests sit [...]

I’m not the only one who thinks that the userscripts.org website, repository for thousands of userscripts, is rather messy to work with. This can be attributed to two core factors if you ask me. First the lack of filtering options to only find scripts for a specific site or category, and second better search options [...]

We were one of the first sites to report that Cnet.com was replacing direct download links on their site with downloads pointing to a Cnet software Installer. This installer, according to Cnet, has been designed to deliver the requested downloads more securely to the client’s computer. The installer at the same time was used to [...]

Adobe has released a new security update for Flash Player that fixes several critical security vulnerabilities in the product. The vulnerabilities affect all platforms Flash Player is available on. Affected software versions are Adobe Flash Player 11.1.102.55 and earlier for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, as well as Adobe Flash Player 11.1.112.61 and [...]

The popular third party DNS provider OpenDNS has been sending out emails in January to part of its customer base announcing an upcoming change in the company’s portfolio. OpenDNS Basic, which was used by home users and businesses alike, has been redesigned as a product for home use only. The product will remain free and [...]

Jotform is an online form creation service that can be used by free and paying customers to create online forms in an easy to use what you see is what you get interface. A short blog post by Jotform co-founder Aytekin Tank today revealead that an unnamed US government agency has “temporarily suspended” the jotform.com [...]

When it comes to sending files to other people, Internet users have a lot of options at their hand. From uploading them to ftp servers or file sharing sites to sending them per email or using a direct transfer client. All are either difficulty to set up for users who are not that tech-savvy, or [...]

There are quite a few things that you cannot do on YouTube due to lack of controls. It is for instance not possible to repeat videos automatically or stop videos from automatically playing if you load it on the video hosting site. Most of the annoyances and missing features on YouTube become available through add-ons [...]

Oracle today has released a critical patch update for JAVA SE that includes both patches for security vulnerabilities and non-security fixes. The company asks all Java users to update their versions of Java SE as soon as possible to protect the underlying systems from attacks exploiting those vulnerabilities. The patch advisory for February 2012 lists [...]

When you compare the Chrome Web Store to the Mozilla Add-ons Repository, you will notice that the former offers little sorting and customization options. Up until now you saw a list of recommended apps and extensions on the front page, with options to change the listing to popular items instead of display apps or extensions [...]

Sometimes you may want to mute all sound coming from the Firefox web browser. Maybe you are currently on a page with a Flash animation that is making irritating sounds, or you are about to answer a phone call and need to mute the sounds in the browser because of that. Or maybe you are [...]

Next week, when I finally download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview I’ll start writing not just one, but two new Windows 8 books, with a third being written later this year, so I’m going to be stupidly busy until the summer  :}  and I want to make sure that the books I write are what [...]

A Single-Site browser serves a very specific purpose. You use it to access one, and sometimes a handful, of websites and services on the Internet. This can be financial sites, your email accounts or other sites with personal information like a medical related sites. The basic idea is to block access to all other sites [...]

Recently Netgear sent me their new DGND3700 router for review, which was very lucky as mine was playing up at the time.  Now on the face of it you might not think the arrival of a router for review would be anything exciting, in this case you could very well be wrong.  This model is [...]