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
Pc Magazine wrote a article with such a long title that I had to cut it to make it fit, the article "Maximum Security: 94 Essential Tips for Staying Safe" has some useful tips for everyone that wants to have a secure as possible computer. They divided the article into several categories, system, networking and wireless, e-mail, Web surfing, malware, and mobile.
You´d probably heard this before. Everyone should secure his personal computer. You read stories like this in every other computer mag, your geeky friends probably tell you the same and even name some programs that you should use because they are the best and most secure. I know that you would like to have a secure computer, well a secured computer, there is nothing like 100% security if you are on a network or the internet. Keep that in mind.
Programs can be loaded at startup of your windows machine, this is called autostart. There are unfortunately numerous places in windows that allow programs to be added to the autostart. The tool Autoruns 8.4 from sysinternals.com lists all known autostart places and programs that use this location to autostart.
Did you ever ask yourself if your firewall is secure enough for your internet activities ? The major concern nowadays is related to pieces of software installed in your computer which may contact and exchange information with the outside World without being authorized and noticed by you.
I always was angered at the fact that I had no possibility to watch certain series and movies in my country while they were highly successful in another. I also dislike the fact that I can´t watch big sportevents live on tv but only recieve a minimal report in the news at that day.
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware.
I still remember my first arcade video game, it was xevious, a vertical scrolling shoot em up game with great graphics and playability. I spend most of my money on that game and had some trouble with my parents because of this.
In case you have not heard about it yet, Nmap is quite simply the best network security scanner around. To top it off, it’s free and even open source. While Nmap is designed primarily for use with *NIX systems, there is an excellent Windows version as well, sadly without the graphical interface NmapFE that is available for *NIX users. WiNmap now provides Nmap with a new face for Windows users.
VIEWTCP is a free network monitoring tool by MicroWorld that examines TCP/IP activity on your Windows-based systems. This free utility lists all TCP and UDP endpoints on your PC, including the remote address (along with Domain name of the remote address) and state of TCP connections.
WinHTTrack is an easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide website from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting html, images, and other files from the server to your computer.
This has been around for some time now but its possible that some of you have not heard of it yet. I found a site through digg.com that has a neat list of 40000 entries that you could partially or fully add to your windows host list and prevent ads from those 40000 hosts to be shown on your system, ever again.
HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor and an integrated development environment designed to help HTML, XHTML, XML and script authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Newcomers to web page development can benefit from letting it point out errors and provide suggestions on how to create standards compliant pages.
Its always a good idea to have some web proxies at hand. You can use them to hide your own ip when you navigate to a site that should not have your IP in their logs. You can use them to
bypass web restrictions / censorship from schools, universities and business and also use them if your country is one of those that likes to prevent its people from collection information on their own.
I loved playing Quake and Quake II, it was a great game that was lots of fun. I enjoyed playing the game with my friends using serial connections back then. To my great suprise someone is porting Quake II to todays graphics standards, the gfx already look extremely good.
If you are looking for an alternative to the windows xp build in unpacker you might want to take a look at 7-Zip. I was always looking for an unpacker besided the big two Winrar and Winzip who are both not free, after some researching I found 7-Zip which handles the most used file formats like zip and rar without problems.
Finally, after a very long time, Daemon Tools 4 has been released. For those who never heard about this fine piece of freeware, it could be best described as a cd and dvd drive emulation software. It simulates up to four additional cd or dvd drives connected to your pc and uses cd or dvd images on your hard disk that contain the cd or dvd content.
I found an interesting article over at logicalexpressions.com that presents an astonishing solution if you have forgotten your windows xp password. This is clearly a security hole because everyone is able to change the passwords, the only requirement would be to have the original windows xp cd at hand.
I know what some of you might be thinking right now. I´am using windows, everything is fine, why should I download and burn a linux live cd ? Whats my gain ? Its partially true of course, for most of the time windows is a pretty stable system but sometimes one encounters small problems that might lead to big ones. For example windows crashes and does not load up anymore, not even in save mode.
No matter which internet page you open this days you are guaranteed to find at least one article mentioning the Sony rootkit affair. Instead of providing you with the latest news on the case customer vs. Sony BMG I´d like to analyse an interesting aspect of it.
In the beginning, there was one guy, who found out about the rootkit software, analysed it in depth and wrote an entry in his blog named Mark's Sysinternals Blog on a well frequented site. Then the ball got rolling, the news was copied and commented on other sites, big portals like slashdot.org and digg.com had articles that soon became the most popular ones for the day.
Crash Doctor is a useful windows freeware that tries to recover crashed windows programs. The program activates itself when a windows program crashes and tries to recover the program from crashing state by careful analysis of the program.
The second purpose of Crash Doctor is to prevent further damage to other files that are dependant on the crashed program. If the program tries to open an existing file for writing CrashDoctor intercepts this and copies the original file to a backup location. This prevents any further damage done by the misbehaving program.
Have you ever come across a website and wondered what language the site was written in ? Or found a great site but could not read what was being said because of some unknown signs used ? The Lextek Language Identifier can help you in this case.
Today google launched their free tracking tool for webmasters. It keeps track of visitor movements and clicks on the webmasters site. There are probably some visitors who don´t like their movements and clicks to be analyzed in detail.
This article explains it all. It provides links to consumer made cd listings that contain the rootkit software, shows how cds with the rootkit software look like, explains how one can check his personal computer for the rootkit and finally gives a detailed walkthrough on how to remove the rootkit software manually from your computer.
If you are like me you are probably downloading lots of files from the internet every day. Those files are using a huge part of my hard disk space and I had to make the decision to get rid of some of them to free some space for other files I´d like to download.
I also have a rather large amount of images on my pc, could well be over 30000 and I always had the impression that there have to be duplicates all over the place. Never had the time to manually check them and delete the duplicates, would take forever.
Gina over at lifehackers.com posted a nice article about places where one can find free music on the internet. The categories include google, of course, amazon, mp3 blogs and del.icio.us.
The outrage from the internet community about Sonys "rootkit" cds is still fresh and spreading like fire on the internet. I always thought that a business should try to please it customers in the first hand, because thats what makes the customers come back.
Its obvious that the music industry has a image problem, especially when someone asks the internet community. My article takes a look at possible solutions for the music industry. How should they react and what should they avoid in the future ?
After lots of controversy about their rootkit music cds Sony announced today that it will halt the production of rootkit music cds. It seems that consumer and media backlash finally paid off.
Ever thought about why your keyboard layout is the way it is today ? Why the first line starts with QWERTY and not some other letter sequence ? Wonder no more, the site "why qwerty was invented explains it all to us.
Help2go has some useful information about why every windows user needs a linux live cd. First, you need it if you need information out of your computer and windows seems to have a problem starting or behaves abnormaly just in the moment you need it most.
The article created a lot of feedback, mostly positive on the subject and I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for their comments and present your thoughts in this new article.
Most visitors agreed that the decision of the RIAA to turn on its customers badly damaged their image and unfortunatly that of musicians as well. It seems to a lot that they don´t care as much about the music than they care about profits.
The first trojan using Sony´s rootkit software to hide itself has been discovered by anti-virus companies.
We read it in the news everyday. The major music industry players like Sony BMG or EMI are reporting losses all over the place and blame it solely on internet pirates. Internet pirates are actually a very good excuse for bad times. Hard facts do not exist and no one is able to check on the numbers the MI provides for losses due to internet pirates.
They don´t seem to realize that they criminalize their own customers with measures like copy protected cd´s and rootkit software installed on customers pc.
The news spread like fire last week: Sony has a installer on some of their music cd´s that might install a rootkit on customers pc´s if they put them into their personal computer. The rootkit software could not be uninstalled by normal means and has already been used by hackers to hide World of Warcraft cheat scripts from being detected by Blizzards Warden client.
Here is another of those online proxy sites that allow you to surf without revealing your ip at the destination site. Its available at xanproxy.be
Cd´s and Dvd´s have the nasty habit to become unreadable due to data loss or aging at the very moment when one needs them most. Dvdisaster creates error correction codes to compensate read errors which are not correctable in the CD/DVD drive.
If you ever sold or bought a used hard disk you probably know about this already. For all others, even if you use delete and format to clear the hard disk before selling it there are possibilities to recover most and possibly all data that was once on the hard disk.
There have been numerous cases in the news where people bought used hard disk and found confidential files on them using tools to recover deleted data. Enter Darik's Boot and Nuke.
I´ve been using spamihilator for the last two years and can only say that this is the best free anti spam software that I ever used. And believe me, I tried a lot. Before i used the software I recieved approximatly 500 spam mails per day, mainly due to published emails on websites that I own.
I searched desperately for a good anti spam software and tried many. Most did not work to well in reducing spam, some worked to well and even stopped my normal mail from arriving. Then, finally after a long evaluation time I found the spam software that I´am still using today. It reduced my daily spam dosis of 500 to 4 in just two days.
Yesterday I´ve written a short tutorial about streamripping and one of the questions that occured was if its possible to rip real audio music as well. Today i present a guide on how to rip the real audio format.
Rapid leech is a fine server script that is able to download files from sites like rapidshare using a server instead of your home connection which speeds up the download process. You need of course a server to install the script and run it from there.
Streamripping means saving mp3 files from internet radio streams to your hard drive. All you need is the right tool that does the work for you and your favorite radio station that broadcasts on the internet and uses a format supported.
This article will give you a tutorial on how to start streamripping and legally download all the latest mp3 files to your computer. I can´t speak for all countries though so you better check out if recording music from radio is legal in your country.
