Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News back in 2005. Martin started his career as a tech support representative at a large German financial corporation which he used to finance his college education in English, Information Technology and History.
He quit college and his job when Ghacks began to attract a large enough readership. He made the decision to become a full time blogger and webmaster, and has not looked back since.
Martin is interested in all things tech. His primary focus is on desktop operating systems, web browsers, Internet services, and privacy related topics.
He published the book The Complete Windows 10 Privacy Guide: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version in 2017. Martin writes a weekly column for fellow tech site Betanews as well.
You can reach Martin on Facebook or on Twitter. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to contact the author directly.
Martin has been quoted or mentioned in many major online and print publications, including Forbes, Lifehacker.com, ComputerWorld, LinkedIn, Reddit, Betanews.com, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, PC World, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Register, and more.
Martin's articles on Ghacks
Two, seemingly authentic, documents have been leaked to the German Pirate Party on Wednesday containing information about costs and technical information about a Skype trojan that could be used to eavesdrop on Skype communications. The documents contain indications of at least one operation of the Skype Trojan in Germany.
People use dozens of social news and bookmarking websites nowadays. All those sites offer toolbars and buttons for various browsers including Firefox, it's just to much if you want to install all of them. Webmasters are looking for ways to submit their sites and articles to those sites with less effort.
MP3 search engines seem to appear by the dozen every week and about 11 of them disappear after a while either because no one uses them or because they have been sued by a record company. I have seen defenses against this. The first is to search and play only music from "legit" sources like Youtube or Last.fm, the other is to host the mp3 search engine in a country that is outside of the Western jurisdiction.
Seeqpod is a mp3 search engine. You type in a song name, artist or any other information you got and Seeqpod displays results found on other Internet sites. Much like Google does but only for music and with the difference that a player is available on the result page that can play videos and music found that way.
CDs and DVDs become faulty with time. If you do use them regularly they tend to become scratches and it happens that sectors on the disk fail and can't be read anymore. This happens usually in a very inappropriate moment. Before you trash the CD or DVD you could try to recover most of the data on it with a program like Iso Puzzle.
I think we all have faced a situation before where we wanted to know if an email was read by a recipient. Did he / she receive the mail, was the email read ? You can't know for sure even if you added read / write notifications to the email because most email programs ask the user about those. There is no sure way to notification at all if the recipient is cautious, most are not on the other hand and these tricks will work most of the time.
Myspace we got a problem, a huge one that is. You might have heard about the vulnerability that allowed anyone to view pictures that have been set to private at Myspace ? You might have also heard that the vulnerability got fixed pretty fast by Myspace. Unfortunately though not fast enough because someone was able to run an automated script that leeched the pictures of more than 44000 private profiles before the security hole was fixed.
MP3 collections grow over time. You rip some CDs, record Internet radio, get some files from friends, download music from the Internet or purchase stuff in an online store. After a while you have got thousands of mp3 files from different sources and a problem. The problem is that the volume of these files does not appear to be the same. It happened before that I was constantly rising and lowering the volume when playing music on my mp3 player.
The business, RIAA, MAFIA, MPAA wants you to believe that putting content on the Internet is affecting sales of that content in a bad way, that companies sell less books, videos, movies, audio CDs because of pirates who download the media from the Internet. The funny thing is that more and more stories emerge that contradict this statement, one of these is the story about Pirate Coelho.
We all read the news that Windows 7 is expected in late 2009 and that first milestone releases are send out to partners for testing purposes. Microsoft is very secretive about features and layout of the Windows Vista successor and does not publish any information regarding the new operating system.
This article is going to explain NTFS Alternate Data Streams: what they are, where they are, how you can detect them, create them and how they are used by hackers. In short, NTFS Alternate Data Streams can be used by hackers to fork file data into existing files without altering the existing file's function or size. You can guess where this is going, right ? They make it relatively easy to hide malicious code inside them which is much harder to detect.
Downloading pictures from Flickr can be a time consuming task, especially if you find a collection that contains dozens or even more pictures that you like and would like to download. A mass downloader for Flickr would aid and help you a lot and reduce the time needed to download all the pictures that you want.
AT&T are currently evaluating if they should implement a system that would in effect monitor all traffic coming through their lines in an effort to stop sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet using P2P networks. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson came up with a weak analogy to prove his point: "It's like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?"
Last.fm is not offering playback of full length music tracks and entire albums on their online music community website for users from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany with other countries to follow soon thereafter. Songs can be played for a maximum of three times before information about a soon to be coming subscription service pops up. Details about the subscription service which will will have options for unlimited playbacks are scarce at this point, it is only sure that it will cost more than the current subscription price of $2.50 monthly.
A wonderful tip about a hack was send to me yesterday by Joe. It describes how to change the way a PC, or most other devices that use a power source, can be protected by by a simple magnet and some stuff that does not cost more than $5. All you need is a reed switch, a magnet and some duct tape. It does secure your pc as well from someone that wants to turn it on without your permission.
Yogi send me an interesting article published at the Guardian Online written by Simon Napier-Bell who has been a part of the Music Industry for over forty years. In it he takes a look back at the beginning of his career, how the Music Industry evolved in the wrong direction to finally experience today's meltdown.
Did you know that Google hosts several alternate domain names on their servers that all point to the Google search engine ? Instead of accessing google.com you could use an official Google domain name like 138008.org.ru or msm.byu.edu instead to use the Google search engine.
My initial answer was one - of course - but then I realized that it is not that easy to answer. One video player is enough to play most videos on my computer, I use SMPlayer for this purpose. But what about all those video portals from tv companies or other companies that rent or distribute videos online ? It is beginning to get a little messy now.
It sometimes happens by accident that the power cable gets disconnected when you work with your notebook. It does not have to be by accident though, maybe you want to use the notebook in a different location without having to save everything and boot again. The problem that arises when a power cable gets disconnected is that the notebook loses battery power which is a huge problem if the battery was not loaded fully.
So, yet another social "whatever" web 2.0 website went public after six months of invite only beta glory. Pownce connects you with friends and other people and you can share files and messages with your contacts. You can use a desktop client using Adobe Air or the website to stay connected.
The Internet offers several ways to view TV with your computer. Some TV stations offer tv shows on websites, some download clients and media players. Then we have those independent TV clients like Joost, Bablegum and Zattoo plus all those Asian P2P clients that stream TV - most of the time in Chinese - to your computer. And then there is another possibility, local stations. Most of those stations are independent stations that offer their TV program as a stream on their website.
I was experiencing some difficulties in Firefox for the last two months. Firefox was unresponsive when it was loading websites which was hard to tolerate and almost made me switch completely to Opera. I could not relate this unresponsiveness to changes that I made to Firefox - be it config changes or add-ons that I installed or uninstalled during that time.
Heroes Happen {Here} is what Microsoft calls the promotional tour for three of its 2008 products which will come to many cities in the United States this year. Users who attend a launch event will get a promotional kit of the three Microsoft products Windows Server® 2008 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008.
My article yesterday explained how to patch the file uxtheme.dll in Windows to be able to add custom themes to Windows. Today I'm going to introduce popular TV Themes for Windows XP that you can use if you have patched the file. You will see some wonderful creative themes centering around a tv show or character, wonderful if you are a fan and would like to use a theme that brings you closer to the show or the character.
I bought a Toshiba notebook back last year that had Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium installed. Unfortunately though I only received a recovery CD and not a retail Windows Vista DVD. You might wonder why this matters; let me tell you. The original retail Windows Vista DVD comes with recovery tools that can be used in various situations to analyze and fix a broken system.
The latest trends in the United States of America seem to be to create TV Channel portals offering streams of tv shows for authorized users. The other trend seems to be to push pay per bandwidth Internet which does not really match that well if you ask me. So, this time it's HBO with the announcement that a service called HBO on Broadband will go live tomorrow for subscribers living in the Wisconsin area with plans to expand the services later this year.
Autopatcher was the perfect solution to update your Windows operating system while it lasted. You could download all patches to your local computer and execute them there. This made it possible to download patches once and update several computers locally without download the patches several times from Microsoft servers.
The file uxtheme.dll is a digitally signed file that validates themes during boot and theme installation. It is restricted and usually means that you can only install a handful of Microsoft certified themes. If you want to add and use custom themes in Windows XP or Windows Vista you have to update the file uxtheme.dll. Once the file is patched you can install and use custom themes.
It seems that a script is currently sold that powers websites like Seekmp3, MP3zy and others. Those websites are mp3 search engines that all use the same Seeqpod database to provide users with mp3 findings. The question however is why someone would want to use a copycat website instead of the original one especially if the original one offers way more options and functions ?
It is possible to create ringtones from any song you like with free tools. Yes, that's right, you don't have to pay a dime for software, the music or the ringtone. All you need is some time and patience. You do need several utilities to create the ringtones: Audacity, the Lame Encoder if you do not have it installed already, FLV Extract, a browser and a video downloader. I suggest using Firefox and the excellent Download Helper extension. Install everything, look at the Download Helper article that I wrote a few weeks ago if you have troubles installing the Firefox add-on.
Turkey has once again banned access to the video portal Youtube. Access to the website Youtube was blocked in Turkey after a court oder on Thursday. Turkish users seem to receive a message explaining the ban of Youtube. The reason for the third ban are once again videos that make fun of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey.
I have never seen that many shutdown options in my life. That was my first thought when I saw a screenshot of Dshutdown, a software created by the Italian programmer Dimio. It offers normal shutdown options like shutting down at a specific time or when a program is closed. These are normal shutdown options that many programs offer but here are some that you might have never heard of before.
I received an email after publishing the article about YPOPS that made it possible with all email clients to retrieve and send Yahoo Mail emails. If you are a Thunderbird user you might find the Webmail extension for Thunderbird a better choice. It adds support for more than just one webmailer. You get support for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Lycos, Mail.com, Aol and Libero. By default the webmail extension and at least one additional component has to be installed to add webmailer support.
The free Yahoo Mail service is not offering Pop3 access to your mails. Pop3 access means that you can use a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to access your Yahoo Mail account instead of having to use the Yahoo website. Only Yahoo Mail Plus, which costs $19.99 a year is offering Pop3 access. There are however other ways and I'm going to show you how you can access your Yahoo Mail account with desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird without having to upgrade or pay for a software.
I'd like to point out three websites offering varied stuff to the professional as well as amateur web-designer and summarize their purpose and properties.
Dante send in this interesting story and I thought I share it the way he send it to me and ask everyone if they know of a way to install Windows Vista on a SATA Raid with difficulties. Let the story begin:
Global Pandora was a great service while it did last. Users from outside the United States where able to listen to Pandora, the Internet Radio that would create music stations based on artists or songs that you like. The Music Industry made the decision to block access to Pandora for all users from outside the United States although most users reported that they discovered new music that they found interesting and that the majority actually bought music they discovered at Pandora.
Just got word that Yahoo Search has started integrating information from Del.icio.us into their search result pages. Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us some years ago and I was wondering since then when they would start to combine the two online services to offer their visitors additional information.
When I first discovered DSynchronize I could not believe that I never heard of this application before. This is probably the easiest way to synchronize files and folders in Windows. The software has a size of 161 Kilobyte and can be run from any location of your hard drive without having to install it.
Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset can be downloaded from Microsoft as a 30 day evaluation version which is more than sufficient for our cause. It helps administrators identify and repair PCs that have become unusable by offering tools that analyze and solve the problem.
