Fake virus alerts are a common yet dangerous weapon often used by cybercriminals. These alerts masquerade themselves as legitimate security warnings, tricking users into actions that end up compromising their own digital […]
XeroBank Browser, or xB Browser which was previously called Torpark, is a portable browser based on Firefox with security and privacy add-ons that can be run out of the box. The burden of installing all those extensions and softwares and making sure that they work correctly is taken of the users hand which should appeal to many users who do not have the time or knowledge to take care of that by themselves.
Printing websites is not as easy as it sounds. It is surely possible to simply hit the CTRL + P shortcut and hope that all relevant information will be on the printout which is usually not the case because menus and advertisement increase the width of printouts of many websites and add unnecessary information to it.
Firefox, Word, Thunderbird and several other applications all have a build in spell checker that warns the user if a word that was written was not found in the dictionary file. There is however no general spell checker in Windows which means that users have to write their texts in softwares that have a spell checker and copy paste them into the software that has none. Or they could write their texts without spell checking.
Web Messengers that allow you to connect to Instant Messenger networks are becoming extremely popular because they make it possible to connect to those networks and chat with your buddies and contacts from computers that where it is not possible to install Instant Messenger software. Meebo was one of the first Web Messengers that I wrote about and Koolim is a comparable service which has the advantage that it is not that popular yet.
Ebay Sniper tools give users the edge over those who do not use them. It takes just a fraction of a second to bid on an item using eBay Sniper softwares while it usually takes between 5-10 seconds if you bid on an item manually. These tools are usually configured to make a bid just a second or two before the auction ends making it impossible for manual bidders to place another bid before the auction ends.
I have written several times about the Autopatcher project which was basically providing users with the opportunity to download one executable file that contained all official patches for their Microsoft operating system. This method had a lot of advantages over downloading patches from Microsoft servers: You would save bandwidth if you had to apply the patches to more than one operating system and did not have to rely on the automatic updates website to select the patches.
From time to time, you might want to check whether the contents of certain websites have changed since the last time you visited them.This could be lots of work if you intend to check them out manually and a tool, that would check websites automatically would be really handy in this situation. Especially if we are talking about dozens or even hundreds of websites and not just a handful.
After two previously mentioned services, I'd like to add another web desktop provider to the "list". A German company well-known for developing advanced audio and video editing software decided to offer their own "portable desktop" to those who register for free. I've tried it myself and I can honestly say it looks promising, although it's still a beta version. Magix's applications are very stylish and pleasant and this free service doesn't make any exception to that rule.
It does not happen very often that I see a demonstration of a new technique and say something like "Wow, give it to me, NOW!" immediately after it finishes. This is one of the times that it actually happened. The real problem with images on websites is that they are more or less static. The webmaster selected a size for the image and this is the size that you see when you visit the page and it does not matter if you have a very small screen or a big one.
Last year I was describing a way to get into the website Experts-Exchange.com by disguising yourself as the Googlebot. Apparently a similar story makes its way around the Internet these days with a more detailed approach detailing the steps that you have to partake to be identified as Googlebot.
One Click Installer is a Firefox extension and Wordpress plugin combination for Wordpress blog owners replacing the need to upload themes and plugins by ftp with a one click installation in Firefox. The extension will take any link pointing to a plugin or theme and upload it to the right folder of your Wordpress installation without the need to do that manually.
The Windows taskbar is not only useful for showing which programs and folders are currently active on your system but can also he customized to store permanent shortcuts to applications and folders as well as links to Internet websites. I would like to show you how to configure your taskbar to add your favorite websites as well as links to your most commonly used applications and folders to it.
Toolbars are a plague; Every other software, especially free software asks the user if he wants to install a toolbar on his system. This is most of the time not that useful and clutters only the browser window. Some toolbars do not offer an uninstallation routine at all which means that it is problematic to remove them completely from your system.
Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.
Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla team, was in the news just a few days ago with the announcement that a separate Thunderbird will receive an independent organizational setting allowing the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.
Web 2.0 and new technologies coming along with it caused a big boom of advanced online services that were often able to substitute software installed on your own computer. Taking security and privacy concerns aside that naturally arise when using such services on the web people got used to it rather quickly and several web 2.0 applications saw a huge burst in users shortly after they could be used by anyone.
A friend of mine was asking me if there was a quick and easy way to stream music over the Internet. I did some research for him and found the solution in the free software Vibe Streamer. This program makes it possible to stream music over Internet and Lan and comes equipped with all the features necessary to make it a great product.
A great feature called SpeedDial has been recently added to Opera. It's a solution providing quick access to your "Top 9" websites and it's faster than using Bookmarks. However the limited number of sites that you can add does not make it a universal feature to speed up surfing in general.
Everton and several other users are publishing their blog earnings every month and I thought that I would do a similar thing with the exception that I will not publish the absolute numbers but only the percentage of what the service is earning. I feel not that comfortable to reveal my earnings in dollars because I feel that it belongs to my private life.
I had the chance to test hundreds of freeware and open-source softwares in the last months and would like to list 20 of them that I would recommend. I'm actually using half of them on my Windows XP computer right now and I'm glad that I made the change from some respected popular programs to lesser known but better alternatives.
PStart is a nice handy application that makes it easy to start applications or open folders on your portable devices. One of the main disadvantages of Windows is that it uses absolute paths in its shortcuts which becomes a big problem if a drive letter changes. A click on the shortcut to the portable version of Firefox would return a not found error message if the driver letter of the USB device changed after the creation of the shortcut.
I'm sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.
Speed Simulator is a nice free tool that makes it possible to see how a website behaves under certain speed limitations. This is for instance useful if you want to see how a user with a 56K modem experiences your site and especially the loading time of it. Only the download speed can be reduced to simulate slower connections.
I personally think that is is very important to use anonymizers whenever possible for most of the tasks on the Internet. All of your movement and actions are tracked and can be easily traced back to you which is probably something that most users on the Internet are either unaware of or do not like at all if they know that this is the case.
One major problem are P2P networks where anonymity is not that easily achieved. If you do lack the technical background you will face severe difficulties on the road to anonymity. There is however a great solution if you want to be anonymous while downloading and sharing files on Bittorrent.
It happens sometimes that you find duplicate mails in your inbox in Thunderbird. This could happen for instance when you pull new emails from the mail server and get disconnected during that process. It could happen then that those emails will be retrieved again when you check for mails. Thunderbird has a nice hidden variable that defines how it should treat duplicate mails and I'm going to tell you how to set it correctly so that duplicate mails are removed automatically.
Let me introduce Stumbleupon and Digg first in case you never heard of this services before. (must be living on the moon for a couple of years, uhm ?) Every user may post and vote for articles on Digg. New articles are kept in the Upcoming Stories section for a maximum of 24 hours. If the article receives enough votes in that time it will be transferred to the frontpage and drive incredible traffic to the website where the article is hosted. If the votes are not sufficient it will be removed and can only be reached using the site search.
It is not happening that often that you have to accented characters or umlauts but it sometimes happens. Maybe you want to write a name like Søren or a unique German street name such as Bachstraße. If you never had to type those characters before you might wonder how it would be possible to write them down using your keyboard. They are obviously not printed on the keys of it.
OperaTor is a combination of Opera, the anonymization service Tor and Privoxy similar to Foxtor which offers the same functionality for Firefox. I don't want to bore you with a lengthy technical description of how Tor is providing anonymity, just that much: Tor uses a layered approach sending your request through a series of servers that only know the server before and after them. This means that the destination server does not know that you requested the package, it only knows the IP of the server before that made the request.
Digg.com is one of the most important social news sites on the Internet. It is not completely user driven but comes close to that. Every registered user may submit as many links to interesting articles and websites as he likes. Those links - with a title and short description - stay in the upcoming stories section for no more than 24 hours. Every user may also vote on as many links to stories as he likes which is seen as a indicator for a stories popularity. The more votes the more users voted in favor of the story.
If you have a website, did you ever wonder how your website would look like in another browser ? It is not that practicable to download and install all browsers that you have to use to test your site. Sure, you could install the most used versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera but what about previous versions ? What about browsers in another Operating System ? This is essential for many webmasters especially for business related websites.
SysExporter is a free software from one of my favorite software developers NirSoft that is able to explorer standard list-views, tree-views, list boxes, combo boxes, text-boxes, and WebBrowser / HTML controls from almost every application to text, HTML or XML files. I think an example would be great at this point to show you what it can do. When you start SysExporter you get a list of all applications and folders that are currently running on your system.
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If you are an early adopter and don't want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.
I use many phrases over and over again. When I write someone an email, a business letter or reply to a private message in a forum. If you are tired of writing "Thank you for your email", "Yours sincerely" or a signature over and over again you might want to take a look at the free software Phrase Express. You can use Phrase Express to paste commonly used phrases into any text field using defined phrases. The program adds some of its own at the beginning but the real beauty is the flexibility of it. It is possible to create a folder and text structure that works best for you. You could for instance create folders for business, private and forums and add as much phrases as you want to those folders.
Many novice users use the software that comes preinstalled with their purchased computer and rely on these to be safe from the dangers that lurk on every corner in the Internet. Trojans, Malware, Spyware, Phishing and worse are threats that every user should know about and be able to deal with. It is pretty easy to detail my security concept, it is not the most secure on earth but even those are not secure at all. If you want security do not connect to the Internet at all, that is my advise.
Google displays 10 search results by default which is probably enough for most users who statistically use the first ten results most of the time ignoring the rest of the results. I on the other hand tend to view more than one page normally and was looking for a way to increase my productivity by displaying more than 10 results on a single search result page. I found a Greasemonkey script which changes the value from 10 to 100 for normal Google searches.
Opera is already a very fast browser, but if you would have the choice between fast and faster than fast, what would you choose ? I took the liberty to compile a list of 10 great tips that speed up Opera in several unique ways. Many of the settings can be changed by simply going to Tools > Preferences in Opera but some can only be used by accessing not so obvious ways like ini files.
Please note that everything that I'm describing here worked fine on my computer. It speed up Opera and increased my browsing experience with it tremendously. While most tips will work for any users no matter their connection to the Internet some tips might only increase performance for broadband users.
Since I started blogging two years ago I came upon thousands of essential, ultimate and top freeware lists but only few really had a lasting impact on the internet community. Most are forgotten the next day and everyone heads on to the next list in line. It does not make sense to simply write another essential list, it does however make sense when I'm concentrating this list on freeware and Open source that I have reviewed here at ghacks. I reviewed more than 360 freeware and Open Source products which could be seen as a preselection.
Firefox has its extensions, Internet Explorer its plugins and Opera has Widgets. They basically mean the same: addons for your browser of choice that add functionality to it. I don't think that Opera deserves to take the third place in the ongoing browser war, it's fast and resource friendly and many users who rely on Firefox or Internet Explorer should at least take a look at it and evaluate it for themselves. They might be surprised about Opera after all.Widgets for Opera come in all colors and shapes and you can compare them pretty much to the excellent list of extensions that are available for Firefox.
I'm currently taking a look at Greasemonkey scripts in general. I always thought that it would be to complicated to install and use them which is absolutely not the case to my astonishment.Look it up is another Greasemonkey script that can be installed like any other Firefox extension. It becomes active once you reboot Firefox and works twofold. First you mark a word or phrase in Firefox and hit a key afterwards to send a request to a dictionary site such as wikipedia.
