Microsoft released a new version of their upcoming Windows Vista operating system called Pre RC1 which means this should be the last version before the release candidate gets out. It is only available for a limted time so hurry up and visit their download pages right away. Only the first 100.000 users will be able to download this version, after that the download will not be available anymore.
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.
This freeware tool is so sweet. I hate when dozens of windows clutter my precious taskbar space with no means to minimize them to the tray. I especially don´t like it when I´am not using the program for a long time but want to keep it running, for example transcoding large video streams.
I have lots of bookmarks, not only in Firefox but also in Internet Explorer and Opera. It happens sometimes when I want to open a bookmark that I have not used for a while that the link points to a dead url which makes me search for mirrors or cached versions of the page. Ultimately I remove the link from the favorites because it is dead and most likely will not be revived at a later date.
Microsoft Groupbar is a freeware application for windows xp that offers an enhanced window management capability. Groupbar does not need to be installed, just download the file and start GroupBar.exe. The tool automatically appears as a sidebar on the left of your screen but can be placed in the other three corners as well. The sidebar displays all running applications, you are free to sort them anyway you like.
This topic might not look interesting at first glance but I promise it will be worth reading it. More than 900 readers subscribed to the feeds of ghacks.net using feedburner alone while many more are using different services to read my feeds. But what are feeds ? They are a short abstract of every article that gets posted here. This means whenever I write an article it will automatically appear in those peoples feed reader software. Many browsers for instance are able to read feeds or can be upgraded to read them.
Sometimes sites are not accessible maybe because they are moving to a new webserver, have problems with their hardware or simply get slashdotted / digged and can´t handle that many requests which leads to timeouts for the user. This happens of course most of the time when you desperately need the information on that website.
Sometimes it´s the small changes that make a big difference. I´am writing a lot of articles as you all know and I find it sometimes hard to locate the cursor in my articles, especially when it is late in the evening and I´am tired. Vippy is a small utility that does only one thing: It changes the color of the cursor to red. Take a look at the image to see the difference. The great thing about vippy is that it should work in nearly all windows applications including Microsoft Word and Open Office.
IceSword is a new contender for the title of the best rootkit revealing and removing program out there at the moment. It is rather hard to find a working download of IceSword but as always I provide a fast way to download the latest version of Icesword named IceSword1.18.rar. Click the link to download the rootkit scanner from rapidshare. In contrast to other rootkit scanners like Blacklight Icesword can not be run automatically. Icesword only provides perhaps the most powerful utilities to scan your system for rootkits and other information.
I´ve written a large article about Coral CDN just a few days ago. Here is a short introduction for those who might have missed this article. Coral CDN caches websites, basically every website that one of its users opens for the first time. After caching this website is available for all other users of the network and is accessible by appending nyud.net:8080 to the url. Now, in this article I mentioned a firefox extension which appends the nyud.net:8080 extension automatically to your links but what about the people who may not use firefox ?
Phishing is a popular method to capture personal data such as passwords, transaction numbers and credit card details. The company I´am working with locks several user accounts each day to prevent harm done to them due to phishing. It normaly starts with an email asking you to update your profile, to download a security update or a email that reveals that you are the highest bidder of an ebay auction (that you do not know about).
You are leaving traces on the computer you are working with unless you are using a live cd or software that runs from an usb stick. Traces are everywhere and it´s rather hard to clean every possible trace by hand. Disk Cleaner is a nice little freeware application that helps you in this task.
Coral CDN (content distribution network) might be the solution if you can´t reach a website because it is either blocked by an administrator, slow or even completly unreachable. Filters and restrictions become more common on the internet. Schools and workplaces blocking access to unwanted sites and networks is a prime example. I can understand that a company does not want you to surf at websites like Ebay during worktime but what about breaks ? What if you are in school and some class did not take place and you would like to check your mail accounts ?
Are you experiencing long shut down times ? Is it taken some minutes after you click on shut down before windows finally shuts down your computer ? This problem could be caused by unloading the current user profile.
This can happen when third party, or even Microsoft applications have not properly cleaned up when exiting. Windows will keep trying to unload the profile until Windows finally decides that it can't and should shutdown. Even if you find the application causing the problem - it may be impossible to do anything about it.
The question that always comes up when I´am talking about the benefits of download managers is why would someone need to use them at all. This can´t be answered in a hurry but my initial response is always the same. First, download managers are great time safers if you download many files from a server that allows only a few connections from the same IP. It´s tiresome to wait until one download is finished to start the next.
It is a good idea to make sure that no one is able to find and use private files on your computer against you. I can think of several reasons why it is wise to secure private files. If you are sharing a computer you have multiple users working with it, would not it be embarrassing if your mother (wife, sister, girlfriend..) found your hidden adult picture stash ? A thief would be more than happy to use all the personal information (login details to sites like paypal or ebay for example) to make some extra bucks.
Some tv stations, like the BBC in Britain, will provide their fellow countrymen with an opportunity to watch the football world cup 2006 in germany live in a streamed version from their webpages. They said on their webpage that "The service will be available to UK broadband users and will mirror terrestrial and interactive coverage." I assume it is free of charge but maybe my loyal British readers could enlight me how they plan on streaming the content.
Press CTRL + ALT + DEL, what do you see ? The windows taskmanager with lots of processes, showing a filename like svhost.exe and a memory usage of that process. Besides checking for trojans, spyware and virii: What´s a good way to check for possible causes if your computer behaves slowly ? Right, the taskmanager. Unfortunatly the process don´t give you lot´s of information which application did cause them to run on your windows version.
The portable apps suite contains a collection of portable freeware applications including a web browser, email client, web editor, office suite, word processor, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client and FTP client. The suite itself comes in two flavours, standard (117 MB) and light edition (44 MB). The difference between the standard and light suite is that the standard suite includes open office while the light suite does not.
In case you are using the windows media player you probably would like to take a look at the upcoming media player 11 by downloading a beta version of it. The download is available right from the microsoft homepage. I found a list of the new features, not sure if it is correct though:
Many people consider themselves to be very secure when they are surfing the internet and that very well may be true. However, there are some things that are often forgotten about. The one thing is the cookie. This is not speaking about the edible version with chocolate chips, but instead the file that a good many web sites across the internet that put onto your system that tell the site that you have visited before and what you have done.
Sometimes it´s a small utility that helps you the most. Did you ever forget a password from an email account, a forum account or another piece of software ? What did you do to find it out again ? Maybe the software / script had a function to mail you your password, but what if it had no option like that ?
AjaxWrite is a superb demonstration what Ajax can do. Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is a web development technique for creating interactive websites. AjaxWrite offers the basic functionality of programs like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice for free on the web. No need to purchase, download or install anything. Open the website and you´re ready to go. The only requirement is firefox 1.5 or newer, the operating system itself does not matter.
Yes, this is even better than the website that offered about 700 shows. Actually the 700 show website used content from guba.com as a source for their shows, but guba offers more of them. All videos belong to one of eight categories (cartoons, comedy, documentary, drama, foreign, miscellanous, music videos and sports).
Channelchooser lets you view more than 70 Tv stations fore free using your favorite web browser. All you need to do is visit their website and click on one of the channels displayed there. You find all sorts of tv stations there, for example Music stations, Cartoon Tv, Game Network, Poker TV and even Adult channels.
One of the great features of Azureus is its plugin capability which is widely used by developers. Today more than 50 plugins are available for Azureus, zeropaid took a look at the most useful ones, let us take a look at the plugins they mention. The plugins mentioned can be categorised to belong either to cosmetic changes, statistics, security, communication and time management.
I found a great guide for Opera 9 which extends Opera tremendously. The guide is divided into seven sections: Menu editing, Integrating Opera with download managers, User Javascript, Buttons, Panels, Widgets and Misc. The menu editing section for instance has some great tips that enhance opera in great ways: It gives you tips how to integrate the bugmenot website into opera, it lets you lookup the bugmenot website for login information of the page you are visiting atm. You also find tips for the following things: How to open graphics with an image viewing program like irfanview, how to open websites with internet explorer or firefox, how to create tinyurls for the current url and much more.
Ok this seems to be serious. If you open a webpage that contains a certain html code your windows will crash. The html is looking like this:
The article essential utilities at laptoplogic.com lists several freeware utilities that should be useful to everyone who owns a notebook (with an intel cpu that is, a guide for amd will follow). All tools mentioned can be desribed as system tools that either show system information, test hardware or tweak it. For example tools to test the notebooks memory (Memtest86) are included as well as dead pixel tester for the lcd screen.
I don´t think a lot of my visitors are still using the Microsoft Internet Explorer but there are some that do. My first advice would be to change the browser immediatly to firefox or opera, for those who are to lazy or have other reason to keep the insecure browser the IE Proxy Changer is a nice little addition to the internet explorer.
Dylan Tweney compiled a list of 101 fabulous freebies for the pcworld website. The link above leads to the category view of all freebies that dylan collected. Categories include Tune Up: Utilities and system tools, Lock It Up: Security/antispam tools, system-stabilizing utilities and Share It: File sharing and storage services. All categories include program links and a short description of the program itself. Lots of known tools but also some lesser known ones and also some services are included.
The question that many people ask is why would someone want to surf anonymously in the first place. Why would someone who does not do something illegal want to surf anonymously at all ? I can think of lots of reasons, here are a few:
A cert.org guide that helps you configure your web browser for safer surfing. It starts with the question why you should secure your web browser and explains common web browser features like Java, ActiveX and Cookies. After that introduction the important part of the article begins with chapter 3 Vulnerabilities and Attack Vectors. Common vulnerabilities like Cross-Site Scripting, Spoofing and Cross-Zone and Cross-Domain Vulnerabilities. The article does not explain everything in great detail but provides links to a in depth explanation.
I´d like to present five freeware tools that everyone should at least take a look at and try out. They are not the "normal" freeware applications that you find in every top ten list like firefox and open office. I write about tools that many users don´t know but would be grateful if they knew they existed. Please be aware that this is my top ten list and that your´s most likely would have different applications in it.
The c-64 was my first computer. I had an atari 2600 before and it seemed like a quantum leep at that time. The C-64 had many classic games that I enjoyed playing: Archon, Boulder Dash and Pirates for instance. You know have the chance to play some of the alltime classics of that era in your browser. The website c64s.com is the Eldorado for everyone who wants to play that classic games again or take a look at games of a time long forgotten.
Kenny created a new little tool that might be helpful for some of you. Its called Privacy Browse, a freeware tool that uses those free proxy sites to surf the web. Download privacy browse from ghacks.net, unrar it to a location of youre choice and run it by double-clicking on Privacy.exe.
This guide will provide you with the means to detect and remove spyware that is installed on your system. Before we start we should define the term spyware. There are different categories of spyware, like adware and malware, that make it difficulty for the user to distinguish between them and select the right tool for their removal.
I found a pearl script at binaryhack.org that lets you mass-download images that are hosted at imageshack.us. All you need is the pearl script and the mechanize module to download images from imageshack. If you are running windows you need a pearl interpreter, PxPearl seems to work with this script.
Taskbar++ is a software that allows you to sort (move) the buttons of the Windows taskbar by Drag & Drop. It´s for the people who care about the buttons' position such as "Mailer is the leftmost!!", "Internet Explorer is next to Explorer", and so on.
Everyone who has to work with different computers has enountered a problem like this. The bookmarks are different because you have no possiblity to synchronise them. It could be that you have a desktop pc and a laptop and want to use the same bookmarks wether you are using the notebook or the desktop computer.
