In a move that can only be described as desperate the RIAA, or better Cary Sherman, its President, suggested at the State of the Net Conference to bundle filters that check for copyrighted data with programs that would benefit the user such as antivirus applications to counter the problem with encryption that they are currently facing. He did not stop there though and suggested that the ISP would monitor, ehm, filter, the user as well through the likes of the modem for instance.

So, what he suggests is that everyone has to use filters on their computers to prevent copyrighted material from being listened to and traded. He knows that users would not want that kind of filtering on their computers but he thinks that they would accept it if the benefits would outweigh that disadvantage.

Basically he wants that everyone helps them to filter every user on earth to prevent unauthorized listening and spreading of copyrighted music. Here are some quotes taken directly from the video..

continue reading "RIAA is becoming desperate"

If you have been a heavy contact book user you know the dread of mass entering people. You need to copy paste their numbers, email addresses, and worst of all, pictures! Personally I love to have pics of everyone, it makes my contacts look nice and shiny, just the way I like it.

If you’re a Facebook user you may have accumulated a lot of contacts who may even have in your Outlook contact list, but don’t have pics for. OutSync is a free application that enables you to mass add all your Facebook friends, and their pics, to your Outlook contact list, with virtually a click of the button.

Sadly, phone numbers and emails are out of the questions, since this activity may leave you banned, therefore the app doesn’t allow it. The reason is pretty straightforward, this way some bad intentioned people could just grab all emails from Facebook, flooding everyone with spam.

continue reading "Sync Facebook and Outlook"

If you want to find out which file type is opened by which application you normally take a look into the File Types tab in Tools > Folder Options. Unfortunately though this menu that is displaying all registered file types is not listing lots of information especially if you consider that you cannot resize the window which means that you can only see several file types there and have to scroll a lot.

File Types Manager from Nirsoft is an alternative that adds additional information, functions and a window that is resizable. The File Types Manager lists additional information like the default icon, the mime type and the modified time to the list of available information.

Default applications can be changed by pressing F4 or by right-clicking the file type and selecting replace file type for selected extension. A list of available applications will be displayed and the user simply selects on to change the default application.

continue reading "File Types Manager"

HiJackThis is a sophisticated security tool that checks a computer running Windows 2000 or higher for possible signs of hijacked applications. It does check lots of different elements like startup items, Browser Helper Objects, running processes and the like and presents a log of the results at the end. This log is hard to read for beginners because it contains “good” and possible “bad” elements in it and it requires knowledge of those elements to make a distinction between elements that you have to keep and those that are indeed malicious in nature.

Most users tend to post their logs in forums so that experienced users can take a look at them and recommend actions. There are actually several forums that can be used.

If you would like fast results you could also use the software HijackReader which analyzes an HijackThis logfile and tries to make the distinction between good and bad results automatically. The HijackReader uses mainly two lists to analyze the logfile.

continue reading "HijackReader analyse HijackThis results"

If you are looking for a complete video downloader that supports a wide variety of video portals and offers lots of extras not found in any other video downloader you might want to check out aTube Catcher (via Genbeta). The software supports 90 video portals currently including Youtube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Myspace, Dailymotion, Bebo, Break, Metacafe and Stage6.

Videos can be downloaded by pasting their url in the tool. If you want to download more than one file you can use the queue manager or provide the url of the Youtube playlist which will download the videos that you want from it. Videos are automatically converted into another format (avi, mpg, mp4, psp, 3gp, mov..) after download if you choose so.

Some functions of the utility are still experimental but very promising. Users can log into Youtube for instance to download private videos from the website. The video capture function will monitor a network card which will automatically download videos from the supported websites to a folder on your hard drive.

continue reading "Video Downloader aTube Catcher"