There are times when it is safer to remain anonymous on the internet - be it that you want to write something about your current company on the web, live in a country that does everything to prevent it's citizens from accessing unbiased information or simply for the reason that you do not wish that someone could track what you are doing on the internet. In an ideal world every user should have the right to read and publish on the internet without the fear of loosing his job or life. The world however is not ideal and tools like FoxTor exist to help those people out.
Most internet users have serious troubles with passwords: they either choose to use the same password on all sites, use passwords that can be easily guessed by looking at the persons background or write all their passwords down to be able to look them up if they forget them. Only a few users use high quality passwords that they are able to remember.
ZoomIt is a freeware from Sysinternals which lets you zoom into part of your screen. With resolutions beyond 1600*1200 it becomes more urgent to have a utility that lets you zoom into part of your screen to magnify that part. It is also nice if you want to take a closer look at low resolution images for instance.
Oh well, the name wonderful icon is not really helping when you try to figure out what this freeware does. The main purpose is to assign new hotkeys to windows. The program offers you a great deal of predefined actions that can be assigned to an hotkey, for instance: Open Browser, Dos Box, Always on Top, Type Char xyz into window, reboot and many more. I would say there are around 100+ predefined actions and you also have the ability to create new ones very easily.
Well what do we have here ? FBI director Robert Mueller wants that service providers record their customers online activities with the same lame excuses that men like him come always up with: Protecting minors and terrorism. Let me get something straight here. Terrorists are not uneducated, they know how to build explosives, they know how to work with computers. They especially now about encryption.
Sounds on my computer seem to be different depending on the application that is used to play the sounds. Sometimes I have almost silent video playback and loud intros when playing games. What's the matter with the differences ? Volumouse gives you immediate control of the volume on your computer making it possible to alter it without leaving the application that you are currently working with.
It is not possible to autorun applications from an USB stick in windows unless you already have a program started that watches the usb ports. APO usb autorun suite makes it pretty easy to use autorun informations on usb drives. The tool checks wether a connected usb drive contains autorun information, if it does those are executed.
I don't like the iTunes software, it is slow and I only use it for copying files to my iPod, never for listening to tunes. I discovered a winamp plugin that gives you full access to your iPod without iTunes, the plugin is called Winamp Media Library iPod Plugin. Once installed it adds the support to Winamp full or pro. I had to upgrade to full before I was able to use this feature but it is well worth it.
Widgets are small programs that add their small windows to your desktop and can be used from there. Widgets come in all colors and forms and you could categorize them the following way:
Thunder7 recently told me that he bought a used Xbox and discovered that the hard drive was full of music files from the previous owner. The original Xbox uses an internal 20 gigabytes hard drive to store save games, patches, music and images. The new Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 will also utilize a hard drive and the following tip is also valid for them.
Everyone in the world seems to have a digital camera nowadays and many seem to be happy using the software that came with the camera. I'am going to introduce some of the free products that I'am using with my camera - you might have heard about some already but I'am sure some are relatively unknown to most of you.
Sometimes I create thumbnails of screenshots and include them in my articles to give you a preview of the subject I'am writing about. I normaly tend to use the print key on windows to make the screenshot and fire up gimp to reduce the size to be able to add it to the article. To be honest, this process takes way to long and I thought of ways to optimize it.
I'm going to show you how to create a secure usb data safe that can be used to store sensitive data. Secure means it is encrypted and will only be encrypted if you need the data that is saved on the stick. This method is also working with other removable media such as zip drives and hard disks.
Those of you who got a glimpse at Windows Vista might remember the explorer breadcrumbs feature which it introduced. Explorer Breadcrumbs for XP takes this functionality to Windows XP. After you installed the free tool a new toolbar is added to the windows explorer showing breadcrumbs. Those breadcrumbs are identical to the navigation structure, if you are opening for example e:\apps\opera you see the breadcrumbs Desktop > My Computer > E: > Apps > Opera.
Jedi Concentrate is a very usefull application that fades out every part of the screen that does not belong to the active window. You can download it from the great website an app a day. The application is open source and uses only 44 Kb unpacked. All you need to do is unpack the application to any place on your hardrive and run it from there.
System Safety Monitor 2 is available in a free version from the developers website. The tool basically works as a firewall preventing malicious software to be started automatically. The free version runs in paranoid mode which means you have to allow or disallow every process and get nagged quite a bit at the beginning. Once the majority of rules are established the software runs a lot smoother and seems to come forth only when you tend to install a new program or change existing ones.
I found a pretty small and useful open source application that pulls images from google images in a given interval and displays them as the wallpaper on the pc the application is running. Once unrared you can run the application right from that location without installation; you will see a small icon in your system tray if the application is running. Right-click the icon and select options.
You see lots of processes when you start your taskmanager, svhost.exe, csrss.exe, winlogon.exe and many more. A user who never dealt with those executables before has a hard time figuring out which are safe and which could be malicious because normally you can't say which program is using those files. A question like "Is svhost.exe a virus, is it safe ?" is normal and can be answered using the methods described below.
Many sites offer to scan your computer for viruses online which should be seen as a last resort because this method has advantages but also disadvantages. If you scan your system online you can be sure that the latest virus definitions are used while scanning your system and that the script that is running was not compromised by a virus or trojan running on your system.
I received an email some days ago from a reader who would like to know if there was a program for Microsoft windows that would replicate the middle mouse functionality of Linux systems, that is copy a text with the first click and paste the text with the second click. Lucky me had already a bookmark to the freeware true x-mouse gizmo for windows website so I send him that information and think it made him happy.
More than ten dedicated servers have been seized by the German police last Thursday. Some servers were running a version of the popular anonymising software Tor (The Onion Routing) which leads to the conclusion that those Tor Servers were most likely configured to run as Exit Nodes as well as normal nodes. As you may know a request runs through different Tor Servers with each only knowing the adjacent servers but not the starting node (you) and the destination. Only the last node in the chain knows the destination.
If you want to make a screenshot by using the print key on your keyboard you have to paste the copied screen to an image manipulation program like gimp and save it from within that program. Would not it be much easier if pressing the print key would immediatly result in one of the following actions specified by the user: a) copy to clipboard (default behavior) b) sent to printer and print the screenshot and c) automatically save the screenshot on your hard drive.
Many websites post random images every time their page is reloaded, webcams come to my mind as well that load a new image once every few minutes. Saving a sequence of images is really painful if you do it manually. You have to click reload, save the image, reload, save the image. SeqDownload is a nice little freeware application that automates this task for you, download the program from the link above and unpack it into a directory of your choice - there is no installation involved, run it right fom the location you unpacked the files to.
Ghacks got slashdotted yesterday and I had to enable caching to make the site run fluent as usual. I'am sorry if you experienced troubles connecting to my website, those should be solved by now. When I was installing Windows XP on my new computer that had only SATA drives I had to use a floppy disk to load the SATA drivers because Windows did not have them onboard at that time. I had to buy a floppy drive, floppy disks and create a bootdisk and load the drivers from that disk during setup.
I sometimes quote websites and do a normal copy paste job to copy the website content to the editor of my blog or into a word processor. Unfortunately this copy job always pastes the original formatting of the original source to the editor as well which means that the text may have a different size, font type or color. It is quite a hassle to remove the formatting of the copied contents to make it look like the rest of your content.
Would you prefer that important data like information about yourself, account numbers, personal documents and the like are accessible all the time from everyone who has access to your computer or that this data is only available to someone with special access ? I would like to give details on an easy way to store your data safely on your computer without wasting lots of time. It may be safer keeping the data in a safe in your appartement but this is not really practicable.
CSpace is a freeware that offers its users the possibility to securely communicate over the internet using public RSA keys with a strength of 2048 bit. Every user creates a 2048 bit RSA key for himself and maintains a contact list of names associated to public keys of other users. Public keys are exchanged using a key server. Cspace users can chat with each other, transfer files and even use a remote desktop feature.
Chaos Crystal, strange name for a freeware that makes it possible to set a transparency level of every window that is open on your windows system - to be preciser, on your windows 2000 or xp system. Chaos Crystal can be run from everywhere without problems because it does not install itself but simply becomes active when executed.
Your hard drive is filled to the brim but you don't know why ? You want to free up some disk space on a drive because you are going to need it for some other files that you want to save there ? Windows is not offering many help when it comes to determining which folders are holding the largest files on your hard drives.
Did you ever get a message like "Cannot delete File / Folder: It is being used by another person or program" or similar messages when you were trying to delete a file or folder ? This happened to me often when I finished viewing a movie file and decided to delete it but could not because Windows was still thinking this movie was in use. Unlocker is the solution to this weird behavior.
Freenigma offers a free firefox extension that adds cryptography functionality to Yahoo, Gmail and MSN. The team says it is working on adding other emails services, as of now, only the three services mentioned are supported. You have to signup at their website to recieve an invitation before you will be able to download the extension. They state that it could take a few hours the most before you recieve the invitation. Mine arrived about ten minutes after I completed it.
Device Lock allows you to close open USB and firewire ports as well as other device ports that make it possible to run external devices on your computer. With all the live cds and programs that run from USB such connections to the pc have become a greater security risk than ever before. System administrators as well as security concerned end users should disable every means of accessing the pc or running software from devices that could access it.
Relakks had a few problems shortly after their start due to the amount of users that registered the service right after it was introduced. Connections have been really slow and I had no chance to further test the service and write about my experience with it. I'am currently writing this article while being connected to Relakks and everything is working fine so far. I'am able to open websites and surf the internet without problems. I'am able to check my email and download files using Relakks.
The company that is developing Bryce, a 3D landscape and animations suite, is giving it away for free for a limited amount of time. You can follow the download link at their website which takes you directly to download.com where you can download Bryce 5. You will be prompted to register the software at the developers homepage which you can do for free to recieve the serial number and some Bryce 5 presets.
A new version of the popular bittorrent client Azureus has been released yesterday to the public. Azureus 2.5 introduces several new features such as Auto Upload Speed which automatically adjusts the upload speed by pinging other members that currently seed the torrent. The interface was improved as well adding new information like idle times and date added to it.
Working with files is really uncomfortable in windows. If you want to copy files from one folder to a different one you will have to open two windows showing both folders and use drag and drop to copy the files. File Managers offer an easier way to work with files by offering two explorer windows for instance with the ability to perform all file operations in the file manager.
Beta day here at Ghacks. First a way to get Windows Vista Beta 2 shipped right to your doorsteps by answering some easy questions in a quiz and now a new beta release of the great website copier HTTrack. The program aims towards the experienced user with all its options and settings but can be used by novices as well. Most settings are optional that should be used for websites that use a lot of scripting and dynamic pages.
I think you can´t have enough file recovery utilities once you lost data on your computer either by accidentaly deleting the files or by crashes or hardware failures. It is better to have one additional try at recovering the data than to give up if the first program that you´ve been using failed to recover the files. It is even better to already have those programs installed or ready at hand to use them immediately after you have lost the files. Chances that you are able to recover the files are highest right after the incident because no new data was written in the sectors the deleted files occupied.
I signed up with Relakks yesterday and was satisfied with this clean and easy process. I had to provide only some information like name, email, password and username and was able to log on to their system. My status was inactive at that time because I did not make a purchase yet. I decided to try the service for one month and had to provide my credit card details in order to do so. One month would cost 6$ which is a good price if they live up to their promises which are a) anonymous internet experience and b) maximum speed.
The Pirate Party is a swedish party that has three main goals: Protected Privacy, Free Knowledge and Shared Culture. They are making a bid for the Swedish parliament in the upcoming election and just introduced the worlds first commercial darknet called Relakks. Let us take a look at the definition of Relaks from the website:
