Twitter made an announcement earlier today that they have added an “always use HTTPS” option on the popular messaging website. HTTPS protects the connection to Twitter from third parties that try to eavesdrop on network traffic. A small example: Say you log in via http while sipping on a hot cup of Java in your [...]

I’ve written a lot about tablets over the last few months and indeed I now own a Windows 7 tablet myself, the ExoPC Slate.  It didn’t take much use of this device to become disillusioned with the modern web as it stands today and I can’t help but wonder if the future of the web [...]

Every Internet user knows Facebook right? Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter are also fairly common. But have you ever heard of Jinni, Joongel or Jangle ? No? Then read on to find out what they, and 23 more sites have to offer. It is surprising that you cannot find a single site on the Internet [...]

ImageShack is one of the popular image hosting websites on the Internet. The service has been around for a long time and open to users from all over the world ever since it was created. Up until February of 2011 everyone was able to embed images on their own website. Visitors were able to view [...]

You know that I’m a pretty happy Giganews customer, never had problems with their Usenet service and everything has been top notch ever since I signed up for my first account back in 2005. That’s 17 Terabytes of data ago. Giganews has improved and expanded their Usenet service ever since, better retention, faster servers, the [...]

You know that I like the Donationcoder project, not only the applications that the team releases free of charge but even more so the philosophy behind the site. The guys that run the site and code for it are a friendly bunch, and services like the option to get a custom program coded in hours [...]

Ghacks regulars know that I’m a big supporter of the free cloud based password manager LastPass. The program is available for popular web browsers and mobile devices, and offers many comfortable password and login related features. This includes online password management, one-click log ins, user profiles to fill out forms faster, a secure password generator [...]

Have you experienced the following situation? You just received an email or message from a friend that contained a link to a funny must see video. Problem is, you do not have time to watch it right now. What do you do? Most users wait until they have the time, some may even bookmark the [...]

Ever wanted to know what government agencies can find out about you thanks to telecommunications Data Retention laws? In telecommunications, data retention refers to the, often temporary, storage of phone records and Internet traffic by commercial organizations like phone companies and ISPs. Data types and retention time differs from country to country, but all can [...]

A new version of the popular blogging platform WordPress has just been released by its developers. WordPress 3.1 contains bug fixes, the developers speak of more than 729 closed issues, new features and several interface changes or enhancements. The update is not a security update which means that there is no rush to install it [...]

The web is moving towards HTML5 with all new browsers supporting the standard including Chrome, Firefox and the forthcoming Internet Explorer 9.  This new scripting language.  It adds new tags including <AUDIO><VIDEO> and the <CANVAS> tag that can be used for creating effective animation and text effects.  The language now allows you to embed all [...]

One of the main points of criticisms of Google’ online document viewer Google Docs Viewer was that several widely used formats were not supported by it. Among the unsupported formats were Microsoft Excel files, both .xls and xlsx to be precise, the new PowerPoint format .pptx, Adobe Photoshop .psd files and many lesser used but [...]

Most users who hear the name AVG think antivirus in a heartbeat and maybe AVG TuneUp or LinkScanner on second thought. It appears though that the popular security company aims to launch a new cloud based storage solution in the coming week. We do not know a lot about AVG LiveKive yet, only that users [...]

Some amazing charts have been released today by Digital Surgeons showing the demographic breakdown of who actually uses the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.  It reveals some extremely interesting data.  This includes the fact that of Facebook’s 500 Million users, a massive 41% log in every single day and that 12%, that’s 60 Million people update [...]

The call “There’s nothing on TV” has long been a common phrase in households around the world, but now I’m beginning hear people express disappointment with the quality and availability of good stuff on the Internet.  This has just gotta be absurd, right!?  Well, perhaps not. There can be absolutely no doubting that the Internet [...]

An update to the popular WordPress blogging platform has just been released. The announcement should appear in the admin interface of the WordPress blog. If it does not check the Updates entry on the left sidebar of the admin menu. According to the developers, WordPress 3.0.5 is a ” security hardening update for all previous [...]

The Huffington post has now confirmed that its been bought by AOL for $315 million.  The website, which was launched in 2005, is essentially a news aggregator featuring coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, lifestyle, world news and so on. AOL is still relying on revenues from existing subscribers to it’s dial up services.  It’s [...]

The protests against President Mubarak in Egypt have escalated in the last few days now that the beleaguered president has said that while he will step down, he won’t do so until September.  To try and stop protests, or at least quell them, Egypt shut down almost its entire Internet service last week and much [...]

Typo3 is a powerful Open Source content management system that runs on system that support recent versions of PHP and MySQL. Linux users usually do not have a problem installing PHP and MySQL on their systems, while Windows users may have troubles finding a solution to run them on their system. Typo3 Winstaller is a [...]

Add-ons and extensions that promise to speed up the downloading of files that are hosted on file hosts such as Rapidshare or Megaupload come and go all the time. The main reason for this fluctuation is the cat and mouse game between file hosting providers and extension developers. File hosts obviously are interested that users [...]

Generally speaking, if it is a web-based tool that starts with “php” (such as phpMyAdmin or phpLDAPadmin) you know that tool is going to make your administrative life a lot easier. Such is the case with a php-based tool created to help you manage all of your VirutalBox VMs from a single tool, from anywhere [...]

Usenet traffic has increased from 5 Terabytes per day in January 2009 to almost 9 Terabytes of traffic per day two years later. The statistics have been collected by Giganews, one of the world’s largest Usenet providers. Especially the last six month have seen an incredible growth by almost 50% in daily traffic. This increase [...]

There are many reasons why you might want or need to control what is seen via a web browser. Be it children, work, or any other reason, you might want to have more control than just your standard proxy software offers. That is where the incredibly powerful WebContentControl comes into play. The WebContentControl GUI takes [...]

When it comes to searching for information, I prefer results from a handful of trusted websites. Limited the results to select web properties only offers several advantages over the standard catch-all approach to search results. Web searchers can be sure that only results from their selected sites appear in the results listing. This improves not [...]

The W3C consortium has unveiled the new logo for the HTML5 web scripting language, but why have they done this and is it really necessary? This has come as a surprise to many people as it’s the first version of the HTML language to have a logo.  This is no ordinary version of HTML though [...]

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is 10 today.  It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is now the largest and most popular reference website with over 17 million articles and 400 million readers.  The name came from the Hawaiian word wiki which means “quick” and the word encyclopedia. At the moment [...]

You may have seen an increasing number of articles about IPv6 in the past year. IPv6 is an Internet Protocol that has been designed as the successor of the currently used IPv4 protocol. IPv4 has been in use since the 80s and it is quickly coming to its limits. The main problem with it is [...]

The first global test of the IPv6 net addressing system will take place on June 8th, and Google, Facebook, Akamai and Yahoo will all be taking part, according to a report by the BBC. It’s been widely reported that the Internet is rapidly running out of addresses using the existing addressing system, IPv4.  The estimate [...]

A study by anti-fraud company MarkMonitor has monitored 43 file-sharing websites and found that between them they had 53 billion visits in the last year, according to a report by the BBC. The top three websites were RapidShare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com which between them generated more than 21 billion visits. The study was commissioned by [...]

Yesterday I wrote here that global spam levels had dropped mysteriously month on month since August 2010 from a high of about a quarter of a trillion messages a day to about 50 billion.  Just to show how quickly everything can change in the world of technology, it all suddenly changed again yesterday. New reports [...]

Are you a Facebook junkie? Do you find yourself constantly posting status updates? And…more important…do you constantly  upload photos of yourself, your friends, your animals, and your computers to your facebook account? If the latter is the case, do you find the standard method of uploading photos to facebook cumbersome? Don’t you wish there was [...]

The buzz word in computing in 2010 has been tablet, as popularised by Apple’s iPad.  This year we’ve seen tablets go on sale using Google’s Android operating system and Windows 7, and we’ve seen both RIM and HP announce specialised tablet operating systems for their own devices. During this time both Android and Windows 7 [...]

When in doubt verify. That’s one of the maxims that I use daily to avoid running into troubles. That’s especially true for files and programs that I want to test and run on my system. Sometimes they come from untrustworthy sources, and even though I have antivirus installed I prefer to double-check those files to [...]

Phishing is still one of the common threats on today’s Internet. Criminals try to get account information and other personal information from users by faking emails and websites of trusted services, websites and authorities. Phishing is very common in the financial sector and PayPal is by far the service with the largest amount of phishing [...]

Millions of Skype users have been unable to make calls using the VoIP service since last night after a software issue affected critical parts of its network according to the BBC. Engineers have been working to rectify the problem so that people will be able to use the service over the Christmas period to contact [...]

I’m usually not writing about paid services here on Ghacks unless I’m personally using them or combine the review with a giveaway so that my readers can benefit from it directly. Recently I stumbled upon two commercial web services called DownloadNow located at downloadnow.net and Leechget, which is available at leechget.com. These services are interesting [...]

The announcement that Dropbox 1.0 final has been released has just been posted at the Dropbox Blog which means that existing users can update their version to the latest one. It also means that new users finally get a product that’s no longer in beta or release candidate stage which should make it more appealing [...]

One of the best things about the Internet and social networks these days is that it makes it easy and simple to identify trends and capture the mood of entire nations.  With another Christmas spent in a period of economic uncertainty that’s what social media agency Yomego did to find out what it is we [...]

British law firm ACS Law has already come under fire this year after hackers broke into their computer system and stole copies of documentation of letters and demands for recompense to people who had been accused by them of illegal file-sharing. Now the firm has been dealt a further blow with a judge rejecting their [...]

Internet users have a few choices when it comes to secure web browsing. It begins with modifications in the web browser, like installing the NoScript add-on to block all scripts from loading on websites, over sandboxing the browser like Sandboxie does, to virtual machines and Live CDs. Webconverger belongs to the Live CD group, with [...]

We love maps here at gHacks, especially ones that show technology trends around the world.  The latest is asocial networking trends map from Vincenzo Consenza who has partitioned the planet up to show what social networks are predominantly used in which countries. It shows clearly the lack of Facebook access in China and, frankly how many [...]

Why is it that WordPress updates are always released the minute before I want to go to bed? WordPress has just released a new update that brings the version of their popular blogging platform to 3.03. The update is a security update which makes it a mandatory update for all WordPress webmasters hosting blogs on [...]

CentOS might well be one of the finest Linux distributions for a server environment. It is basically a mimic of Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the proprietary software and the price attached to it. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to set CentOS up as your go-to Web server. It’s reliable, it’s stable, [...]

CPALead is an advertising company that offers webmasters a script to place on their website. The script acts as a barrier between public and private contents on the website. Visitors who want to access the content secured by CPALead need to perform an action to do so. This usually means filling out a survey before [...]

Donationcoder are holding a Nany coding challenge every year. Nany, which stands for New Apps (for a) New Year is held for the fourth time this year and we can expect some great new apps that are published thanks to the challenge. The newsletter lists 27 different entries as of December 2 with enough time [...]

LastPass’s business model seems to be solid. The makers of the popular cross-browser password management application provide users with a free password manager, and those that need extras with a premium account for $12 a year. Premium users get support for mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry or Android based mobiles, multifactor authentication, Yubikey [...]

I have been trying to move a Godaddy email account to the desktop email client Thunderbird for the last 30 minutes. The main problem that I have with Godaddy’s website in general is that it is rather messy, with hundreds of links and menus. What you need is usually hidden deep inside a complex navigation [...]

I have mixed feelings about this, but the BBC is reporting that the police in the UK are seeking co-operation with the Internet’s domain provider, Nominet, to close .uk domains that are associated with crime. This is definitely a welcome move as Nominet currently has no obligation to close down criminal websites, but the Serious and [...]

Twitter is offering RSS feed links on public profile pages and the user’s own profile. The problem with user profile feeds is that they cannot be copied and pasted into many RSS readers since they require authentication, which many web based readers and some desktop readers do not support. The solution? Gtweet, a service that [...]

Some webmasters believe that offering partial feeds of their news entries only in the RSS Feed drives more visitors to their website. While that may be true, it has an adverse effect as well. The feed subscription count will drop, as some users will unsubscribe from it, especially if the webmaster has offered full-text feeds [...]