With the advent of social media, many aspects of our lives have become much more public than at any other time in our history. However, there are certain times when we not only want to maintain our privacy and security out of choice, but also out of necessity. One of these occasions is when using online services to back up and protect our digital files, whether they are documents, images, video or music. Our digital data is important to us, and part of who we are. It belongs to us, and its loss would be a major blow to many of us.

Therefore, understanding how online backup works, and in particular how are files are kept secure, is an important part of maintaining trust in the different services available for cloud storage. Understandably, companies providing online backup services will make a big deal about how secure their services are. For those who want extra peace of mind, however, a proper understanding of just how and why your data is kept secure helps to give you extra trust in the companies that manage your information.

What is Online Backup?

The principles behind online backup and cloud storage services are quite simple. In most cases, in order to keep accurate and current copies of your information, a backup service will most likely provide you with a piece of software to install on your computer. With a few clicks of your keyboard and mouse, you tell the software which files and folders on your computer you want to back up. The software will then securely copy those files and folders and send them, encrypted, over the internet for safe storage on a remote system. Using an online backup or cloud storage service prevents you having potentially unreliable and expensive hard drive costs of your own.

Online backup software keeps an up-to-date track of your files and folders, noting any changes when they occur, and uploading new versions of files to the online servers as and when it is necessary.

Of course, for this to happen safely, it has to happen securely. This means that the online backup service providers need to use special software and protocols (which is how computers on the internet move things around) in order to make sure your data and information is fully protected. Security is not the only consideration, however.
See here more information about online backup services.

What is Online Backup Security?

At the heart of online backup security are Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Socket Layers (SSL). If you have ever watched a spy movie, where a character calls back to base and asks for a connection to a ‘secure line’, the principle is exactly the same. With older phone lines, as well as with some forms of internet communication, it is theoretically possible for someone to ‘listen in’ and grab snippets of the conversation or data if they have the right skills or equipment. This is why security is of vital importance in protecting your data.

By using TLS and SSL, just as with a secure line in a spy movie plot, the information is scrambled and protected in such a way that it is extremely difficult for someone to listen in and grab any information. Almost all online file storage service providers, regardless of the connection they provide for you to upload your files (whether it is through their customized proprietary software, through a web interface, or through FTP), will be set up in a manner involving such measures as TLS and SSL to help keep your data safe.

The most significant part about this is that when you are uploading your important files and documents to your online backup service provider, you can be sure you are only uploading this data to them, and not to a third party who is snooping in on the internet ‘conversation’. Transport Layer Security and Secure Socket Layers are exactly the same services and protocols that are at work when you do your online shopping or internet banking. In those instances, people are often dealing with debit and credit card information and other important and personal financial information. You can therefore rest assured that an online backup service using TLS and SSL has the same level of high security as your bank.

Encryption

Next time that you are shopping online, look at the web address in your browser bar when you are going through the purchasing part of the site. Most web addresses begin with http://, but a secure web address (meaning one that uses SSL to transmit your information securely) will begin instead with https://. The key to this security is something that is called encryption. Encryption is a means whereby information is garbled, or encoded, at one end of the information chain. It is then decoded at the other end so that it makes sense again. If the information is interrupted in the middle of the transmission, it will make no sense whatsoever without the encryption key.

In the case of online data backups, the encryption keys that are used to encode and decode data are created and managed by the backup service companies. These companies go to great lengths to make sure that the keys are kept completely secure and are only accessed by those who are authorized to help you manage your data.  Some companies will even allow you to create your own encryption keys, if you would prefer to have even more control over your data. For most people, however, this is unnecessary.

Encryption can vary, with 40-bit encryption (no longer used) being typically the lowest level, and 448-bit encryption being the highest level. Most companies will use 128-bit standardized encryption, as does SSL. This is more than enough, as it has never been hacked.

Rest Assured that Online Backup Services are Secure

Although most online backup service providers will be considerably smaller businesses than the bank that looks after your money, your data is just as important to your backup service provider as your financial information is to your bank. This is exactly the reason why they use the same protocols and services, and will have staff whose priority is the safety of your data and information. With TLS and SSL encryption up to 128-bits, and in some cases beyond, you can be absolutely sure that your information and files are secure with online backup.

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After being a Telewest/Virgin Media broadband customer for over 10 years, I recently switched to BT Infinity.  Performance has been good and I’m getting an average of 35/7.5Mbps from my 40/10Mbps (upgrading this year to 80/20Mbps) service so I’m happy.

One side benefit of becoming a BT Infinity customer is I now have access to over 3.5 million BT Fon and BT Openzone wifi hotspots.  Luckily I noticed in the BT Fon small print that they recommended using a VPN, because the wifi traffic on public hotspots isn’t encrpyted.  Without a personal VPN, hackers and data sniffers can tap into your connection on an unsecured public Wi-Fi Hotspot.

This was a real shock to my system as I’d never thought about the security implications of using a public hotspot before.  Luckily, I had a quick solution in that I’m a giganews subscriber which now includes a free VyprVPN account.  This lets me create a secure connection from any location and any device including laptops, mobile phones and tablets.

VyprVPN accounts start from $14.99, but an even better value option in my view is to get  a Giganews Diamond account for $24.99 for the first 3 months.  You then get access to VyprVPN as part of your Giganews package, as well as:

• access to the best usenet provider: best retention, completion and the ability to max out any download connection
• 30GB of free online backup

If you’re not sure, you can take Giganews for a spin free for 14 days by following this link.

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Today is an exciting day for Windows enthusiasts.  Windows 7 is  a great OS, but Windows 8 is a much more radical overhaul of the Windows operating system and goes much further than Windows 7 did in terms of creating a new interface and new features.

If you want to get a good peak at Windows 8, Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview (Windows 8 Beta) today.  Download links for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be available in the Windows 8 Download Center as soon as they become available, so head on over to Windows 8 News for more.

On the site, there’s a new Windows 8 Consumer Preview board where you can share your experiences with the latest build.  If you need more help with Windows 8, please use the Windows 8 Help forum and sub-forums.

To register with the Windows 8 forums yet, then click here.

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Attracting a woman is not a very complicated science. And I dare say every woman likes to be chased so her true charm can shine. So if you can better understand women and know some arts of seduction, you are sure to be popular with women. Below are some seduction tips accompanied by some useful software for you to become a master seducer!

How to Pick Up Women in Nightclubs —— Be Sociable!

Women would like to date a man who has social value. You need not to do great deeds to prove your social value. Just a smile or a warm greeting is good enough for women to evaluate your social value. And Nightclub is the greatest testing platform to test your social value, also the most desirable place to pick up women. ‘How to Pick Up Women in Nightclubs’ is a useful guide for you to develop your social skills. It will tell you how to capture a woman’s attention, how to talk to women. It also impart the step-by-step procedures from saying a simple“hello” to more intimate matters.

Free Joke Book —— Be Humorous!

Women would like to date a man who has a generous sense of humor. Learn to laugh at yourself and learn to tell funny jokes. “Free Joke Book” is a joke e-book with 40 pages of Blonde jokes, Redneck Jokes, Sports jokes, Bar jokes etc etc.

Subliminal Blaster —— Be Confident!

As a female, I can say for sure: we love confident and charismatic men. Try to be a charismatic “alpha male” and you’ll be irresistable. You can develop these qualities with the help of sublimianl messages which can train your subconscious mind. Subliminal Blaster flashes messages on your computer screen that have the power to reprogram your mind. Please don’t be skeptical about what I say. It really works. Simply by letting a message run on your computer and you can improve your confidence. If you still hesitate to believe me, you can check out Wikepedia for research on “Subliminal Messages”

MB Free Palmistry —— Be tactical

Women don’t want men to think they’re easy to get because no woman wants to be thought of as a slut. So if you want to touch her or have some touches with a hidden intimacy motive, Palm reading is a good place to begin with. No need to be an expert Palm reader, just use some jargons and she’ll believe you. However, the tactic could work better if you can make a pointed comment. MB Free Palmistry is an effective tool based on the art of Palmistry. You can use it to practice your Palm reading skills or just learn some jargons. Moreover, you can know more about the woman through her interaction.

AllMyNotes Organizer ——Be Mindful

To be a master seducer, you need to be attentive of the targeted woman’s information, like the birthday date, hobbies, favorite books, music and food. The more you know about her, the more she will appreciate you. As a seducer, you certainly communicated with a lot of women. As a result, you need to remember a lot of information. So you need an awesome note organizer. Here comes AllMyNotes Organizer which can store information about your girls and everything about your seduction relationships clear and organized in your computer.

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Contract creation is a necessary task for almost any corporation, organisation, governing body, or anyone who must rely on others to remain responsible and diligent for any length of time. Contracts are legally binding and therefore must be rigorously detailed in their language. Writing a contract is time consuming work that requires both the knowledge of an attorney and the writing tenacity of a novelist. It’s said that the average business contract takes weeks and even a month to compile effectively. It’s the effectiveness that makes the hard work essential: without a contract that actually protects you lawfully from irresponsible behavior and criminal conduct committed by workers, making a contract is simply a waste of time.

In the world of information technology ensuring that you’re using contracts with precise language that reflect the most up-to-date changes in law and order is fundamental. If there were ever a field contracts were meant for it’d be IT. Those who manage the day-to-day development and programming functions of a business are oftentimes privileged with access to huge vaults of personal information as well as sensitive business information. Not only that, the job of IT workers is almost more important than the business itself, for in today’s world no other faction of your workforce is going to be more necessary in making sure your enterprise operates smoothly than those in IT. Without a responsible team of brains manning the machines and programs your business relies on, you’re on the fast track to closing up shop.

But it simply doesn’t make sound business sense to commit huge amounts of employee time or your own time to developing perfected contracts to ensure the tasks of an IT business are met and accomplished while rules and regulations aren’t violated. You’ll lose so much time and energy that it’s simply not worth it. That’s why it’s so important that IT businesses and enterprises heavily reliant on online sales and digital means of making money get a hold of contract management software that works best for them. They work in catching risks before they happen and more importantly before anything is signed. Contract management software removes the necessity for an employee to spend time writing a contract or paying an attorney the fee to do it. It cuts down on everything that can be otherwise spent more effectively in making your business perform better.

The world of digital business invites us to more opportunity than ever before, yet risks remain as always. Nobody likes writing contracts or signing them but in an age when employees can have access to every piece of important information your business has ever recorded, contracts are the only way to achieve peace of mind. Instead of spending all of your time creating these necessities yourself, get software that will do it for you. That’s simply good IT policy no matter what you’re up to.

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One of the nice features in Google OS is the guest mode that automatically defaults to Incognito mode.  This means that guests to your home don’t have to worry about revealing what websites they’ve visited or any of their private information.

If you want to recreate a similar effect on your PC i.e. each time you start Google Chrome it automatically starts in privacy mode, then this is easy to achieve:

1. Right-click on the icon(s) you use to start Google Chrome and click on ‘Properties’
2. In the window that opens up find the target line and at the end of the current entry add ‘–incognito’ at the end of the entry.  Remember to leave a space between …chrome.exe and –incognito
3. Click Ok

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I’ve been using an amazing computer program from DVBlogic in my home for just over a year that has transformed the way we watch tv within our household.  I have a very connected home and since 2007 all of my music, videos, dvds, blu-rays and photos have been stored on a central machine.

Now with DVBlogic DVBLink I’ve been able to add live and recorded tv to this equation, which are now shared not only within my home but also online, allowing me to watch any of my shows through a browser or on my iPad or iPhone 4.

Initially I had DVBlogic running on a Windows Home Server, but in the last year my ‘server’ machine has been running Windows 7 to reduce costs as I ditched WHS when I realised the new version would still not have Media Center integrated (I now have one machine storing the files and connected to my main TV, rather than one machine storing the files via WHS and a second running Windows 7 Media Center connected to a TV).

The diagram below best shows how DVBlogic works:

My ‘server’ is represented by the PC on the left, which is connected to my main TV.  Within this machine I have 4x Hauppauge  WinTV-Nova-HD-S2 TV cards each taking a feed from my Satellite.  DVBLogic’s TVSource product uses these cards and makes both the SD and HD channels available within Windows Media Center with full support e.g. guide listings, live tv, pausing tv, scheduled recordings etc etc.

My Four TV cards allow me to watch or record up to four channels at once.  There’s no limit on how many cards can be added and DVBLink TVSource even allows different types of cards to be mixed i.e. Satellite, Cable and Terrestrial TV channels can all be used together as DVBLink intelligently merges these channels.   TV cards that aren’t directly supported by Media Center such as DVB-C cards can also be used via DVBLink TVSource.

The real power of TVSource is unlocked though, when it is combined with DVBLink Network Pack which is depicted by the right-hand side of the diagram above.  Network Pack allows the tv cards on your PC to be shared with other devices including other Windows Media Centers. Without Network Pack if you wanted to watch live TV on other Media Centers, then each media center needed to have its own tv cards installed.  Now, TV cards installed on one PC are shared with other PCs.

In my household for instance, we have 4 Media Centers each running W7MC.  Network Pack serves up 4 virtual tuners for each of these machines, so across my home we can record and watch up to four shows at once.  So in room 1 we could be watching BBC1 HD and recording Sky 1, in room 2 my daughter could be watching BabyTV and in room 3 I could be recording the football – i.e. up to four channels streamed from one PC to the others.  Network Pack also manages tuner sharing so if two or more rooms are actually watching the same channel at the same time, only one tuner is used rather than two.  Using Recorded TV Manager 3, any recordings made are copied over to the ‘server’ allowing them to be watched from any machine at a later date.

UPNP enabled clients such as Sony Playstation 3 and almost any internet connected device such as ipads and iphones are also supported. Streaming live tv requires a reasonably powered PC, but if you find your PC struggling then there are settings available to reduce the picture quality.   The software is so fantastic that you can even use the online service to schedule recordings that you’ve realised you’ve forgotten or are going to miss because you are running late.

All of this costs just over 40 euros; an amazingly low price for such a great piece of software that is constantly being updated by the developers.  If you have more than one PC in your home or just want to be able to watch your TV online then investing in DVBlink is a no-brainer.  If you’re not sure if DVBLink is right for you, then you can try the product out free for 30 days.

More: DVBLogic

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With all the publicity of Bin Laden’s death, especially with the possible release of some of the death photos, it should come as no surprise that malware hackers are taking advantage of this phenomenon.  While the US Government is still debating on whether to release the photos or not, hackers have made it a point to announce that recipients of e-mail can indeed view the photos.

But watch out.

As was reported earlier today  (05-04-11) by a CBS affiliate, hackers are using the incident to spread malware. Here is what is happening, hackers and scammers are using emails and links that  promise users to view those pictures; but the goal of the hackers is to try to infect your computer. Apparently enough of this is going around that the FBI says these emails could even appear to come from your friends, claiming to show either photos of bin Laden dead or a video of his death.  But don’t buy into it. It’s actually a virus or malware that could steal personal information or cause your entire system to crash.

The malware is so bad that officials are also warning that Internet searches can direct you to sites with malware or virus. And the bad links are also popping up on Facebook and other social media.

Common Sense

Two things need to be clear. Until the US government releases the photos, and there is an ongoing debate about this don’t assume that someone has picked up the photos and you can view them. If they are released, you will know about it from legitimate new sources, not blogs.  Check www.refdesk.com for information as it comes out.

Secondly, this is a good time to check your malware anti-virus software and make sure that it is up to date. And don’t be fooled by e-mails from friends or acquaintances. Apparently social engineering is now a big way of getting viruses into PC’s.

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CD Sync Portable

If you have multipe CD’s fr videos, pictures, music, or just plain files, you know how hard it can be to find the right file amongs all of your CD’s.  CD Sync Portable is for you. It allows you to catalog your CDs/DVDs/Flash Drives/Folders etc. With CD Sync Portable, you get the ability to browse and search your data, even when the source media is not available. Just catalog all your disks and you will notice how easy it is to find the file you want.

This programs stores information and properties about each file such as music properties, including the artist name, album title, album year, and song title etc.  It also stores document properties, like company, subject, and category; and video and image properties, like width and height.
[Download Link]

Primitive Disk Indexer

This program allows you to save the file structure of any disk.  It will display information about the  folders and files there are on a disk even if you do not have this disk. So if you have a large CD and DVD collection, you can view what files there are on any disk without even so much as having to touch that disk and insert it into the CD drive. The program comes with an Explorer-like interface. Plus disks of any type are supported: floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, hard disks, USB disks and others.  The program is free and does not require installation.

[Download Link]

Visual CD   v1.7

Visual CD is a disk cataloging tool to index CDs/DVDs, floppy disks, hard disks, and even folders. The nice thing about this program is that you can explore the disk catalogs, and search files and folders; you can create MP3 playlists without actually inserting the physical disks in the drive! Upon insertion of the corresponding disk, you can open files, split files into smaller pieces, extract ZIP, RAR, and CAB archives. It is a very functional utility.

[Download Link]

Summary

These programs offer users with CD/DVD  management operations, and can replace the time consuming element of finding files.  They will create a catalog simply by running the program and inserting the CD/DVE or USB drive. Thereafter it will store the catalog in a library for easy access.

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There are a lot of Community Software Programs, such as dating sites, forums, chat rooms, and so on. Now you can build your own Community with the help of these programs.

Dolphin 7

Dolphin is an  ”all-in-one” free community platform that you can use to your own social networking, community or online dating site without any limits and under your full control. There are  hundreds of features, module plugins and tools. Everything is included and there are many extension possibilities.  It comes with PHP community scripts, Flash plugins, Adobe AIR and Mobile apps that provide full control and flexibility. Once you launch your site, you can customize it.  You can  use it for free with a BoonEx link in the footer or buy a $99 permanent license to remove that requirement.

[Download Link]

Simple Machines Forum

SMF  is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. If you want a program that will let you work with your forums and your website, SMF is the one. It has a template engine that gives you  control of the lay-out of your message board and with  Server Side Includes (SSI) – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.  Another thing of importance is that SMF is written in the PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. S

[Download Link]

Oxwall Community Software

Oxwall is a flexible and easy to use PHP/MySQL community software platform.  Because it is flexible you can easily modify the program using  Oxwall plugins.  These plugins are complete units of functionality that can be used for various purposes.  You can use Oxwall for a wide range of projects ranging  from family sites, custom social networks to collaboration tools and enterprise community solutions.

[Download Link]

Summary

If you are interested in having your own community site on the Internet these tools will provide you with a lot of opportunities to start from scratch and built something useful and innovative.

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I think it’s safe to say that we all know that the Android Market is growing at a rapid pace. Every month there’s new reports on how Android sales have overtaken every other device on the market, so it’s only obvious that developers are going to be making more and more apps for it’s market.

Well according to the latest report from Distimo, Google’s Android Market now offers 134,342 free apps, while Apple’s App Store only has 121,845 free Apps. However, overall Apple still has the largest number of Apps at 333,214 while Android is a bit behind at 206,143.

If you look at the Android Market, you will see that there is more free apps than paid ones, on the contrary, Apple’s app store is the reverse, with many more paid apps than free ones.

While Apple’s App store is the largest, it was the slowest out of all the App stores in terms of growth for March.

Apple’s iPad App Store managed to grow by 12 percent last month to a reasonable 75,755 applications, with 34,120 of those designated for the iPad only. Overall when you combine the iPhone and iPad App Store Apple have an impressive 367,334 available.

Interestingly the iPad apps have become more expensive over time, while all the other app stores have gone in the opposite direction. The average iPad app price is now a steep $5.36 and only 30 percent of apps are free.

Distimo are also forecasting that RIM’s Blackberry App store will double in size over the next 6 months and will probably surpass Nokia’s Ovi Store by the end of May. What’s more, they expect the Android Market to continue growing at it’s furious pace and to become the largest App Store on the market within 5 months! That would put them ahead of Apple’s App Stores, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Blackberry App World and the Nokia Ovi Store.

Things aren’t really looking too good for Nokia’s Ovi Stores, the company itself is loosing a lot of its market share over the last couple of months, and Distimo reckon that Windows Phone 7 Marketplace will be larger than it within a couple of months.

Now these figures have been calculated by Distimo themselves, and are not supplied from the various App Markets themselves. However they are generally fairly accurate.

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We’ve been hearing about how the “Cloud” will change operations. For some businesses, it will mean a big change, as long as something like Amazon’s thunderstorm doesn’t happen to them. (Their cloud services was down for about 48 hours.) But for ordinary users, what does operating on the cloud mean?

Here are some backup programs that reside on the “Cloud.” They should help you begin to make an assessment about how important these options will be for you.

SkyDrive

For starters let’s look at Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  It will provide you with 25 GB of free online storage for sharing Microsoft Office files, docs and photos. Backing up to the Cloud is a good way to test how good the services will be. If you start with something simple, that you know works and how it works, you have the makings of understanding how more sophisticated operations can take place.

What else? Well it is a password protected system, and it is free to use. All you need in a Windows Live account (create one … its free). You can also use Microsoft Office programs on line. You don’t even need to have it installed on your computer.

[Microsoft SkyDrive]

SDExplorer

So let’s say that you’ve signed up for SkyDrive. Great. Now what? Well you want to access the storage on the Cloud. Right? Can it be easily done? Sure. Use SDExplorer, which works with SkyDrive and Explorer to make it look like your connection to the Cloud resembles a drive on your computer. Here is why you want to use it.

• You make your work with SkyDrive more efficient;
• You find the Web interface for SkyDrive  inconvenient and complex, so you want something simpler and easier to use.
• You want to assign a drive letter to your SkyDrive folders;
• You want to work with your cloud storage files quickly;
• You want the data on your SkyDrive account to always be at your fingertips.

[SDExplorer]

iDrive

Another Cloud backup system id iDrive. It has a basic free system that lets you backup 5Gb of data. Then there are multiple plans available for more backup needs. You can backup SQL Databases, use it with your iPhone; and it is available for Mac as well.

[iDrive]

Summary

These three Cloud Based Backup Options to Look At should provide you with the basics of Cloud operations. Nothing is more important than backup, and these backup-programs give you the incentive to take care of you data. Especially when it is free.

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If you like Microsoft Office 2010, but you would like to try something else. Or maybe you don’t like Microsoft Office and want to try something else, here are three Office Suite Alternatives that you can use to do the same work that Microsoft office does.

Softmaker 2010

The first MS Office alternative is SoftMaker Office 2010. This suite reads and writes Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files – and costs a lot less than  Microsoft Office. It can be used at home or in business.  It is faster than MS Office 2010, and reliable.

	TextMaker 2010, a  word processor that reads and writes Microsoft Word files easily.
	PlanMaker 2010, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet.
	SoftMaker Presentations 2010, the PowerPoint presentation like graphics program.
	BasicMaker 2010, a scripting language and environment that lets you automate recurring tasks.

SoftMaker Office 2010 is available for only € 69.95, or  $79.95.

[SoftMaker.com]

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Libre Office

LibreOffice is the free Open Source personal productivity suite. Users can install this on a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux platform. This program gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Help and support, and documentation is freely available from a large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.

• It is  easy to personalize – Microsoft Office users will find the switch easy and painless, with a familiar look and feel.
• It is compatible with all major competitors’ file formats. You can easily import files from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and many other formats.

[Download Link]

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Zoho

The two previous applications were similar in that you downloaded and installed the application. But Zoho is different because you do the work on the cloud. Zoho provides an integrated portfolio of online applications for businesses. It has more than 20 different applications that operate different services like Collaboration, Business and Productivity applications. Because the applications are cloud based, they require nothing more than a browser.

[Zoho.com]

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Summary

There is no need to use Microsoft Office because there are alternatives to the production system that Microsoft has created. Some must be download; while others  operate on the cloud.

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Keeping your computer clock accurate is important. You can keep it current by looking at your watch and setting your computer clock to that; but realistically that is not a good solution. A better one involves synchronizing your PC clock to the atomic clock server, such as the atomic clock servers operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States. Your current computer time is compared with the current atomic time and an adjustment is made to keep your local computer up-to-date with the exact time now.

Atomic Clock Sync

This program will access an atomic clock server to get the current time with the accuracy available and update your PC’s information. It can even be set to automatically check the time once a day to keep your PC’s time accurate forever.

[Download Link]

Now that you have your time clock synchronized with the US atomic clock, you can look at some other time programs to enhance you system. So let’s start with Chimer.

Chimer

This program gives you a variety of choices for operating an analog like time clock. It has 18 dials, and 33 chimes, there are Ships Bells and 4 alarms. It has a variety of modes for your operation, like automatic portable mode, and a sample mode, and an introduction menu to let you get acquainted with the program. It has a realtime variable dial size with analogue hour/minute/second hands and 3 user customizable dials or hands only option.

[Download Link]

Watch Me

Sometimes you are working on a spreadsheet. Othertimes you may be working on a PowerPoint presentations but you want to keep track of the time that you spent on the system. This program is a timer program that can be used to time a number of different tasks or events together or independently of each other. You can name each timer and record information about what you are timing. This is a solution for those who need to track their time for hourly billing, or time-sheets, or to keep track of projects and tasks.

[Download Link]

Source: http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp40/its.cfm

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Most of you are not surprised to hear that malware attacks can hit any browser, Internet Explorer is not necessarily weaker than other browsers in the security camp, they just get hit more often. So some reports are coming out that Google Chrome is now the malware authors browser of choice.  In a series of malware screen attacks clever hackers are targeting Chrome users with “recommendations” about getting rid of malware.

Here is how it starts do a google search for Silverlight datagrid reorder columns. On the fifth page you’ll see a site hit. Click on it, and the problems start.

Type a description in Google Chrome

Step 2

This dialog box pops up over the page and falsely suggests that the browser, Google Chrome, has found malware. If you click OK, it begins a fake scan.

Step 3

A "realistic" Chrome security warning page - but fake

Here is where the malware becomes viable. That red background and the big icon at the top are visually similar to actual security warnings that Google Chrome uses. The malware author has also inserted a reference to Google Chrome in this fake “scanning” screen.

Step 4

The recommended fix is now given to the user.

Bad grammar might give it away…Meaning that this social-engineering attack is likely to fail with an English-speaking victim, who should be suspicious of the bad grammar. But a user whose primary language is something other than English might well be fooled.

For the last few months, warnings have been issued to users about new malware attacks. They’ve learned to be more suspicious and their browsing habits have changed. But so have malware authors. With this change  malware authors are also adapting to the changing habits of PC users. There is no obvious message to the effect of  ”press this link and a virus attack will start.” Instead you are likely to see something like “you’ve been infected, click here to remove the virus.” And if anything, the malware authors are more patient; anticipating that not every attack that they have will work, but if one in 10 work, that is still significant.

Source: ZDNet

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A personal information manager ( PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. As an information management tool, a PIM tool’s purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of “personal information”.

Golden Rules Organizer

If you need a ell-structured personal organizer and goal system, then look at this program . It sSupports three planning levels: mission & values, projects, recurring and one-time activities. What else? It includes a planner facility, and provides diary, time tracking, contact list, hierarchical notes/bookmarks on any subject.  If you have data, it can be extracted to spreadsheets, printed, reported, exported/imported. And for those that worry about losing information, it provides backup and recovery facilities. This program is designed for professionals, yet suitable for novices.

GoldenRule Organizer

[Download Link]

Typhoeus Stickies

One way to organize you personal information is with a set of sticky notes. That’s what Typhoeus Stickies does for you. It is an application designed to run by its icon on your taskbar, in seconds you can create or edit rich text notes utilizing colour, formatting or images. You can create lists or just create beautiful documents.  It  allows more than just the creation of useful stickies, you can organize your views, however you want, and store little pieces of information or fully fledged documents.

[Download Link]

myPortablePIM

Desktop calendar with many functions.Day’s event,tasks with alarm,GMail checker,image viewer,notes,feed RSS,launcher,password manager,image viewer,weather and address book. This program is designed to be portable; it can be used from a USB stick to always have your data with you. There is no installation. Just unzip the downloaded package and you’re ready: no key and no log file written by myPortablePIM outside of it’s installation folder.

[Download Link]

Summary

We’ve looked at three personal information managers that give you different ways of organizing you personal index book.  The one with the highest user rating is myPortablePIM; but the others may be more functional for your needs.

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Here are some Free Network Analysis Tools that you should look at for help in understanding your network operations.

WirelessNetView

Start with Wireless. If you want to see the wireless activity around you, run WirelessNetView. All detected networks will provide the following information: SSID, Last Signal Quality, Average Signal Quality, Detection Counter, Authentication Algorithm, Cipher Algorithm, MAC Address, RSSI, Channel Frequency, and Channel Number.

System Requirements

1. Wireless network adapter and wireless card driver that works with the built-in wireless support of Windows XP/Vista/7
2. The OS supported is Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP with SP2/SP3. For Windows XP with SP2, it’s recommended to install the KB918997 update. To download this update, click here.

[Download Link]

Bopup Scanner

Who’s on your Network? Now you can find out quickly with this network scanner, which  displays active computers with logged user names (NetBIOS), MAC and IP addresses. Bopup Scanner also recognizes and shows HTTP (Web) servers running on remote computers (TCP ports). It also quickly detects online computers, and allows you to browse shared resources of a remote computer and save results to a text file. This is a simple but effective tool for network admins to use.

[Download Link]

KontrolPack

Most networks have computers that have different operating systems. Network Administrators now you have the ability to access hundreds of computers simultaneously regardless of their operating systems guaranteeing your privacy and your data integrity. It is a cross platform system which will support either GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, MS Windows and access whichever workstation you want. You can get Windows from Mac, Mac from Linux, Linux from Windows, and so on; or all of this simultaneously.

[Download Link]

Summary

These network monitoring tools can offer a quick way to access information about the network system you are on. This can be a wireless network, or one with multiple operating systems.

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FBackup

FBackup is an easy to use backup program. Among its features it does mirror backups and has wizards for backup & restore. It also has file filters and it has internal scheduler.  It can create standard zip files or exact copies of files, plus it backs up open files and lets you protect your backed up files using zip passwords. In addition FBackup is free for both personal and commercial use settings. Cost: Free

[Download Link]

EASEUS Disk Copy

If you want to have a disk copy program that can work with any operating system, you should give Disk Copy a look at. This is a strong and viable freeware program providing sector to sector disk or partition copy regardless of the file systems or partition scheme. The sector to sector method assures you a copy identity to the original. This allows it to be used besides backup, for cloning, or upgrading your original small hard drive into a new larger drive.  It can backup anything from old hard drive including deleted, lost files and inaccessible data. Cost: Free

[Download Link]

DriveImage XML

Here is a slightly different backup program. DriveImage XML lets you backup logical drives and partitions to image files. You can also browse these images, view and extract files, restore the images to the same or a different drive, and you can copy directly from drive to drive.  By storing the images in XML file format, you can process them with 3rd party tools.  Restore images to drives without having to reboot. Cost Free

[Download Link]

Summary

Depending on your backup requirements, these freeware examples can provide you with an easy option to keep your files safe and secure. The FBackup may be the most comprehensive program listed here, but look at Easeus if you have diskcopy needs.  DriveImage lets you store your backup files in XML format.

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Didn’t Peter Crouch play like a robot last night? Stick to dancing Peter.

Tonight we see the two remaining English teams meeting in the champions league quarter finals, and I feel Chelsea V Man Utd is going to be a classic.  I’m tempted to put money on Torres scoring his first goal for Chelsea.

If you want to watch tonight’s match on your PC for free, then follow this guide to Sopcast and you’ll be watching tonight’s quarter final within minutes.   The guide can also be used to setup Sopcast to  watch matches from other tournaments, even those that are not being broadcast live in your country.  This includes tonight’s other game featuring Barcelona V Shakhtar Donetsk.

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The time has come for another major challenge for my team Spurs, when we face the mighty Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter finals.

If you’re not lucky enough to be able to watch the game on TV then you can watch the Real Madrid V Tottenham Champions League quarter final match for free by following this guide within minutes using Sopcast.  The guide can also be used to watch tonight’s other game featuring Inter Milan V Schalke 04, and tomorrow’s games:

• Barcelona V Shakhtar Donetsk
• Chelsea V Man Utd

I think we might just nip this one, as so far we’ve shown no fear in matches.  I’ve got the place to myself, so there’ll be no interruptions from my wife or daughter.  Let’s hope that tottenham’s defence can shackle Ronaldo and Co, letting Gareth Bale and Van der Vaart to do their damage at the other end.

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Recent events in the area of Internet security have shown that big players can make a difference and shut down hackers or hacking sites. But on the other hand, hackers are still successful. Point in fact. Epsilon, an outsourcing e-mail provider was hacked on March 30. Epsilon provides e-mail services for a number of private companies and the names and e-mail addresses of individuals, and in some cases, the account balances,  were compromised. In fact, as I was writing this post, I got an e-mail from my bank telling me that their e-mails database had been compromised. The e-mail provider? Epsilon.

Epsilon’s e-mail Client Stadium

Epsilon is no small player in the outsourced e-mail market. They have a base of over 2,500 clients and send over 40 billion emails annually last year. Their client base includes 7 clients of the Fortune 10 to build and host their customer databases.

What the hackers expect to get is unknown. Perhaps it is nothing more complicated that saying that they can do it, but it also may play into the idea that as a learning experience the hackers can feel confident that their approach was successful. This in turn may lead to another attack in the not so distant future.

Who is to Blame?

Obviously the hacker. But from a business point of view, you have to look at Epsilon itself. How secure was their operation? Obviously, what ever their security was, it was not enough. But again let’s face it. Even the Pentagon has been hacked into. And you know that they are really tight with their security. The point? The point is that a determined hacker will succeed, it is just a matter of time. Who knows how long the hacker took. Maybe they’ve been at it for about 2 days, or 2 years. But it does pose a different question, why  don’t the companies keep their own mail server in house? It’s possible, and they could hire a consulting firm to maintain and manage the e-mail service if they didn’t have their own expertise.

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The Rustock Botnet was taken down earlier this month. It had accounted for billions of spam e-mails daily.  According to Symantec’s March 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report this is a big accomplishment because the botnet may not be able to recover its operation.

Last Years Spam Cycle

By the end of last year, this Rustock was responsible for sending out 44 billion spam messages per day, or more than 47 percent of the world’s total output, making it the leading purveyor of spam. Though Rustock lost some steam this year, it still managed to send out more than 13 billion daily spam e-mails earlier this month prior to its takedown, said Symantec.

Who was responsible for the take down

Legal actions by Microsoft and other organizations like Pfizer, FireEye and others, plus raids by federal law enforcement managed to cut off the network a few weeks ago. As a result of the take down, overall global spam messages dropped to around 33 billion per day, compared with 52 billion the prior week.

Other Botnets

Rustock may be down, and even out, but by no means is it the only botnet out there doing spamming operations. According to Symantec, Bagle has now become the most active spambot in 2011 so far. Bagle has been around for a number of years and it has spawned at least 70 variants since the virus emerged in January 2004. Some iterations have been more sophisticated than others, blending mass-mailing and Trojan horse techniques. Last year it was sending out more than 8 billion junk e-mails per day; most of them linked to pharmaceutical products, said the report.

Then there are other botnets such as Festi and Cutwail. They have accounted for a big amount of overall spam. For March, slightly more than 83 percent of all global spam was triggered by botnets, a gain of 6 percentage points since the end of 2010.

Source: Dvorak Uncensored

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Two stories appeared today that are worth talking about. One deals with Apple and its success in the market place. And one deals with Linux. They each have different marketing models, and each is successful.

Apple

Let’s take Apple for starters.  Their sales and growth numbers could continue in the same direction for the next two years and thereby making them a $200 billion giant that could eventually dwarf the revenue of tech companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Why not? Despite the fact that many companies are copying Apple’s hardware and software sets, none of these other companies are as original as Apple. Let’s face it, which is original, the iPhone or Windows Phone 7, or Android?

One prevailing notion is that Apple’s hardware successes with the iPad and iPhone has created a cycle where the same customers buy applications in the App Store, and then continue to buy Apple’s products to keep using the software. So the customer buy’s one piece of hardware and then continues to buy more than one App. So this is a notion that makes sense.

Linux

Next is Linux. Here is a company that basis itself on free software. And according to analysts,  Red Hat delivered a strong fourth quarter and is on track to be the first pure play open source company to hit $1 billion in annual revenue.

So here are some of the figures.  Linux reported fourth quarter net income of $33.5 million, or 17 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings were 26 cents a share for the fourth quarter was $244.8 million, and this was up as much as 25 percent from a year ago. Red Hat’s earnings were boosted by 2 cents a share due to a research and development tax credit. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 22 cents a share on sales of $236 million. For the year ended Feb. 28, 2011, Red Hat reported net income of $107.3 million, or 55 cents a share, on revenue of $909.3 million, up 22 percent from a year ago.

Now that is from a company whose model is based on the open-source, “Free Software” installation. Actually all of us know that the “free” part is the open-source code. Great is you want to rewrite the code yourself and create your own OS. But otherwise, Linux sells it’s own product which it wraps around the Open-source code. This way it says it is delivering a free product, but actually it sells its own configuration of the shell around the open source code.

The result

So you have two companies that make significant revenue based on different models of performance and expectations. It may be something that other tech companies could learn from.

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TuneUp is a piece of software that I’ve been longing to review for a while now. After having multiple hard drive failures and recovering my music library several times, it’s safe to say that my iTunes library was in a sorry state. A lot of the track names were wrong and most of the artists and album information was missing, not to mention the artwork.

What I’ve foolishly done in the past is go through each track (all 1000+ of them) and painstakingly look up all the correct information for them, but I normally give up after 10 excruciating minutes praying for an easier way. And I’m finally delighted to announce that there is! TuneUp is that piece of software we’ve all been praying for that will fix your iTunes woes (it’s also compatible with Windows Media Player).

After using TuneUp on my iTunes library, I decided to put it to the ultimate test and see just how bad a music collection it could sort out. So what I did was start a fresh iTunes library and imported 30 songs with no information at all. Not a single track name, artist, album or genre attached to them, they were simply labelled “track 1”, “track 2” etc..

I really didn’t think TuneUp could sort this out, I mean there was no information what so ever for it to use to try and work out what songs they were, not to mention the album artwork and artist info.

So here’s how it went:

1.The installation process was simply and straightforward, I just downloaded TuneUp from their site and followed the installation process. One thing to note is you need to make sure iTunes is closed when you’re installing it.

2. Once it was installed and ready to go I fired up itunes and the TuneUp Companion opened up in a window beside it.

Before you can actually start cleaning up your library you need to register with TuneUp (and enter in your activation code if you purchased the full version of it) which is a simple and straightforward process and then you’re ready to go!

3. In the TuneUp Companion window you will see there is 5 labels, Clean, Cover Art, Tuniverse, Concerts and Share. For now we’ll focus on the Clean and I’ll talk about the others later on.

The feature that I used first as recommended by TuneUp was the “Clean” one. This basically will go through the songs you drag into the sidebar and find all the information for them.

I dragged all 30 songs from my library into the sidebar and let it do its thing.

4. It took a minute just to process the tracks but once it got going it identified each song in seconds.

Once TuneUp starts going through your songs it sorts them into 3 categories

• Matches: High confidence rating (Pretty much certain match 90%+)
• Likely Matches: Medium confidence rating (80%+)
• Not Found: It was unable to find matches for those tracks

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If you have ever had a list of songs or music files that when you launched them, you didn’t know anything other than the song name? Sometimes you knew the artist, sometimes not. If you launch iTunes, you may see Track 01, and “Unknown Artist.” TuneUpMedia can remedy this problem.

TuneUpMedia can analyze your collection of music, find identical versions against its 90 million database of songs and music and complete your music library with titles, artists names, and version type. Another interesting feature is that you can get cover art for your music. You can fill in the gaps with pictures of your recording stars, or with pictures of album covers. TuneUpMedia goes out and discovers the music and any connections to the song, artist, or album. It works with iTunes and Windows Media Player.

In a way this is like Google. If you were to type in Google, “Who were the Beatles” you would get several million hits that mention the Beatles. Some of those hits would be about the Fab 4, others about their music, their politics, their albums, and so on. Well TuneUpMedia, does something like that. It “searches” for corresponding information about your song or artist and fills in what those connections are.

One of those connections is an alert about upcoming concerts in your area with a performing artist that you select. Will Bjork be in a concert in the area soon? How about Massive Attack; will they be in concert soon and in my city? If the artist will have a performance in the area (same state), then you will be notified about it, and you can plan accordingly.

You can get information about the artist from other sites, like Wikipedia. This is available through the Tuniverse tab. You will also see a music video provided by YouTube. This certainly fills in a complement of information that you now have available about the artist.  You can also share information about your favorite artist, song or album with Facebook.

PC and Mac Versions

Users will also be happy to know that the TuneUpMedia program is available on both Mac and PC computers.

Here are the requirements for a PC connection. The operating system can be Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7. The Processor must be a Pentium 4 processor or greater; with Dual Core recommended, and 2GB RAM, and 20 MB free hard drive space. The digital music must be in MP3, M4A or WMA format. Fast Internet connection is preferred, like DSL, or Cable with no proxy or corporate firewall. Finally you need iTunes 7.4 or greater or Windows Media Player 10+.

Here are the requirements for a Mac. They recommend an Intel or PowerPC Machine running 10.4 or later with 1GB RAM, and you need at least 50MB free hard drive space (depending on your collection’s size). You need a fast cable connection such as DSL or Cable without a proxy or corporate firewall in place. The digital music format is MP3 or M4A and iTunes 7.4 or greater.

The activation code is for one per machine, regardless of PC or Mac, and if you upgrade the OS, this does not count as a transfer; re-enter the activation code or ask for the original code.

There are three versions available, TuneUp Gold which sells for $29.95 and comes with unlimited song cleanups, unlimited cover art, unlimited concert alerts and unlimited access to the Tuniverse. TuneUP annual goes for 19.95 and comes with 1 year of song cleanups and cover art. But you get unlimited concert alerts and access to Tuniverse. TuneUp Lite if free. However, you get 100 song clean-ups and 50 cover art saves. But, like the other two versions you get unlimited concert alerts and access to Tuniverse.

Overall, this is a great product if you want to manage your music collection.

To download the software, click here.

TuneUpMedia.com

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TuneUP media is one of those nifty little solutions that allows us to be our original, messy selves. Let’s face it, 99.1% of the Mac using population is not organized when it comes to curating their digital music collection. And our prolific, err, sharing, makes things worse. After ending up with endless gigs of songs, iTunes usefulness is greatly reduced because most of your tracks don’t have proper id. And let’s not even talk about cover art. TuneUp promised us that it will correct all that. So I took it for a spin on my super-messy collection.

TuneUp’s installation is pretty straightforward like most other Mac Apps. Mount the .dmg file and drag into your applications folder. One thing that I was hoping for was finding them on the recently launched Mac App Store but they’re operating from their own website at the moment

TuneUp Welcome screen, pre-registration

So when you start up, it asks you to register for an account. This account seems mainly useful for storing your profile in the cloud so that you can change machines easily without losing your profile. TuneUp needs this profile for its extra features like Tuniverse, Concerts and Share. More on them later.

Once you have registered, it gives you a summary of all the features that the plugin offers. From here on, it works according to whatever you choose. I began with the Covert Art feature.

Like most Mac lovers, it pains me to see mostly placeholders in CoverFlow view. So this is one feature that is in great demand and Tuneup executes it quite well.

It gives you multiple options for each album that it thinks it has found. You can just click on save all and it will start saving everything that it thinks is right. However, that is not recommended. Since some tracks are often part of  compilations, you should ideally go through each one to figure out whether it is correct or not. Accuracy level in my case wasn’t that high, I would say about 50-60%. But it’s not completely the TuneUp’s fault. I have a lot of music that come as part of individual compilations that are not very mainstream. Hence, it is bound to confuse a service like TuneUp that is dependent on databases that mostly have mainstream music. However, TuneUp does an excellent job of guiding you through the process and giving you all the options you need.

TuneUp’s first selling point is of course it’s clean up feature that promises to correct and fill out track information including title, genre, artist, album, etc. And it has some intelligent options to let you fine tune the process.

The only thing that I did not find was a way to remove duplicates, which I hoped it did. However, TuneUp says that they did not include it because they do not want to duplicate iTunes features. My point is that I prefer managing my own music because I have my own system of sorting them which helps me when I am compiling sets for the time when I’m playing live. So if they helped me out in that regard it would’ve been great. One things I liked a lot was was TuneUp’s torrent friendly feature. Another caveat TuneUp is limited to non-DRM AAC (MP4) and MP3 during clean up and I suspect it is the same for the cover art feature. It gave me this notification when I was trying to clean up some tracks but didn’t say which ones were being excluded from the clean up.

The results are categorized according to the level of match with the track. In my case, the results were somewhat lower than 50% but that is not indicative because I chose to search it on a particularly underground collection of tracks which needed clean up. When it came to the tracks that have seen proper mainstream release, the matches were spot on. So for most people, the level of accuracy should be quite high.

There are multiple options for each result and just like Cover Art, it tries to club stray songs in to albums to speed up the clean up process. If you want a total overview of your collection, there’s an intelligent analyze feature.

Mine is of course in a very bad state!

Next is a neat little content discovery feature called Tuniverse. It is basically a consolidation of what you can do with the song, including in-built tweeting of the songs, for which you will have to authorize TuneUp with Twitter first. Tuniverse bring together tweeting of the songs, inline YouTube video streaming for the song and tweeting the video, artist Bio, Album recommendations from Amazon Music, Concert updates and ticket purchases from StubHub! and eBay search for related items on sale. It is nice to see that they have built in their revenue sources in a way that adds value instead becoming annoying.

TuneUp also encourages you to share your now playing, most player tracks, and last five tracks and such things with Facebook.

Verdict: -

For the kind of work it does, TuneUp is not a simple app based only on AppleScript based and the additional things like Tuniverse, Facebook, twitter integration makes the package even better. For a year’s worth of clean up, you pay $19.95 [TuneUp Annual] and $29.95 for unlimited [TuneUp Gold]. In my opinion, the pricing is a bit steep and that is the only real complaint I have. This and the lack of a duplicate removing feature are the two things I’d like to see addressed. But for everything else — TuneUp delivers what it promises and it does it in an really user-friendly manner. Plus, I really like their retro superhero style artwork with the man’s head and the antennae!

Click on the gallery for full resolution screenshots.

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It’s fairly well known at this stage that high end smartphones like the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile devices can all be hacked and have been, but surprisingly only 16% of all mobiles are actually smartphones. The rest are just regular bog standard feature phones that can send and receive texts, make phone calls and play back mp3′s. Now if you’re one of those users, don’t worry your not alone. These feature phones comprise of 5 Billion users around the world.

Up until now we didn’t think those phones could be hacked, simply because no one bothered to try, until now that is. Researchers from the Berlin Institute of Technology have come up with “SMS-o-Death.”

Feature phones are harder to attack, but two students discovered a way to send malicious text messages and force cell phones to shut down or disconnect from the network. They took advantage of an SMS protocol that is used to send small programs known as binaries which network operators often use to change settings remotely on mobile phones.

By taking advantage of this, they were able to create malicious messages for all popular feature phones like Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax. The attacks could abruptly knock the phone off or disconnect it from the network without warning.

Because feature phones are so common and take up most of the market a large number of users could be knocked out by these attacks if they ever happen. One limitation with the attacks is that they need to know your phone number and your phone model, however 5 text messages could be sent out to thousands of phones aimed at the most popular feature phones and take down a large number of them.

So is there a way to protect against this? Well not really, it would be up to the networks to roll out firmware upgrades for all those feature phones, and most feature phone users wouldn’t be aware of how to update the firmware over USB or may not be bothered to at all. Aside from filtering all text messages (which is already done for spam) there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

However Smartphone users are still more likely to get attacked since their devices generally contain a lot more personal information worth gaining, were as the worst that can happen at the moment with feature phones is that it gets turned off.

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The old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Re-apply that to keep your security close, but the hackers closer. That is what Google has done. Google has given then $14,000 in rewards for discovering critical and high-risk vulnerabilities affecting its Chrome web browser. This process of paying people to discover browser vulnerabilities has been ongoing now for several months.

Google issued patches for 16 documented vulnerabilities. The current Chrome version is 8.0.552.237 and the patches affect this and previous versions. Indeed, one researcher, Sergey Glazunov, found a critical bug and he received over $3100 for the discovery.

Here is a breakdown of the discovered risks.

Medium Risk:

[$1000] [67393] Medium Risk: Uninitialized pointer in the browser triggered by rogue extension.

[58053] Medium Risk: Browser crash in extensions notification handling

High Risk:

• [$1337] [65764] High Risk: Bad pointer handling in node iteration.
• [66334] High Crashes when printing multi-page PDFs.
• [$1000] [66560] High Risk: Stale pointer with CSS + canvas.
• [$500] [66748] High Risk: Stale pointer with CSS + cursors.
• [67100] High Risk: Use after free in PDF page handling.
• [$1000] [67208] High Risk: Stack corruption after PDF out-of-memory condition.
• [$1000] [67303] High Bad memory access with mismatched video frame sizes.
• [$500] [67363] High Risk: Stale pointer with SVG use element.
• [$1000] [68115] High Risk: Vorbis decoder buffer overflows.
• [$1000] [68170] High Risk: Buffer overflow in PDF shading.
• [$1000] [68178] High Risk: Bad cast in anchor handling.  .
• [$1000] [68181] High Risk: Bad cast in video handling
• [$1000] [68439] High Risk: Stale rendering node after DOM node removal.

Critical risk:

[$3133.7] [68666] Critical: Stale pointer in speech handling.

For all users, the question is, are the vulnerabilities fixed? Google quietly ships updates using the browser’s silent/automatic update mechanism. This keeps updates current without the need for user intervention (or approval).

Source: zdnet

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Google seem to be rolling out new versions of Android quicker than anyone else can update their hardware. But this latest flavor, Honeycomb is said to “Entirely for Tablets” We had heard rumors up to now that it would only be for tablets and this is confirmed in the latest video released by Google.

I think it’s safe to say that this Tablet UI doesn’t look anything much like the current Android, and it’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t work to well on smartphones.

It was debuted on the Motorola Xoom tablet today at CES which will be shipping with Android 3.0 along with a Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core processor that can kick out an impressive 2Ghz of power. It has two digital cameras on board: A front-facing 2.0-megapixel camera acts as a webcam for video chat, and a 5.0-megapixel camera on back is for photos and 720p high-definition video capture. It has a higher resolution than the iPad at 1280×800 compared to 1024×768 and user will be able to watch 1080P HD video as well as use the HDMI port.

Android 3.0 is a brand new, completely different user interface. It’s a truly virtual and holographic user interface” with “refined multitasking, elegant notifications,” and “home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive.” It has a new browser, auto-fill, private browsing and integrated book mark syncing

Have a look at the Android 3.0 Honeycomb video below, and let me know what you think of the new interface.

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Apple’s iPhone is one of a kind. All the latest models of Android phones are lagging way behind this new release, especially when it comes to the App Store and its Android equivalent — the Marketplace. In response to the criticism it seems almost, Google has declared a new store client app for phones running on Android OS 1.6 or higher. With Cover Flow-like browsable control for Android phones, the makers of Android plan to add popular content like live wallpapers and widgets that will present a variety of information on a single page that will include the links, similar to how Apple’s App Store works. Google plans to cater to users with newer phones, in hoping that it will serve their purpose.

A change in policy on software returns and the release of commercial commodities instead of simple ad-supported headers, which is favored by Google, is also on the cards for the Android Market. The hardware fragmentation issues that have been plaguing the Android apps have been addressed, according to Google. They will now support target-based screen sizes and densities along with GL texture compression formats. However, one caveat still remains — Apple’s limits are 40x larger for iOS app downloads in comparison to Google’s Android markets’ 50MB.

Games larger than 300MB, like the latest Infinity Blade and GPS app having maps of the US and Canada, have been released on to the iOS platform. Users are allowed to download big apps from iTunes App Store via WiFi. This is not available in the Android Market. Only three games, as noted by Apple, are present on the Android Marketplace. John Carmack, a gaming legend, said that he was especially excited about the iPhone because he’s of the opinion that the gaming experience was much better on the iPhone than on Android phones. Not much progress has been seen in the Android Market on that count, though improvements in the gaming sector have continued.

This progress will however, not be obvious in the market as the developers are still not sure of their apps that are very ‘graphics-intensive’. A lot of market mismanagement has been noticed as Google, according to reports, has not been retuning investment as much as iPhone. iPhone has paid 50 times more and has proved to be of better quality than Google, which provides only certain high quality apps. Google  has also not allowed the usage of local currencies in order to buy foreign apps.

Spam and other infringements like trademark and copyright have also been seen to be monetized by Google.  This is widespread in the Android market. Spam ringtones, pretentious iTunes and paid Disney themes have cluttered the ranks of the multimedia category. These complaints have so far been overlooked. A study says that 97% of Asians, 70% of Europeans and 43% of North Americans have been using Android and gaming illegally on it. Android smart-phones are sold more in number as compared to iPhones because users are attracted to the stolen games and also because there’s a larger presence through multiple manufacturers and markets.

Google Ads even promote fake Android apps and thus they have successfully taken over the market. Game developer Rovio tweeted that that is how Google promotes business. For this reason, it has also faced consequences regarding poor security, unwittingly allowing users to collect private information. To build an equivalent platform for an iTunes-like app for Android and policing the software catalogue would mean quite an investment but it should not be that hard for one of the largest companies on the plaent! Google employees however, note that the release of web apps for Google’s Chrome OS platform has already taken the path towards rivaling Apple’s App Store. However, it is definitely a long, long way off from being an equal and a threat for Apple.

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It was much rumored that Google were going to be releasing a Chrome OS netbook in the coming weeks, and then a rumored announcement date of December 7th was thrown out to the web. Then Google decided it was time to let us in on the whole deal, and confirmed that a Chrome OS event is to be held on December 7th.

Now Google haven’t specifically said that they will be releasing a Chrome OS netbook, but they did say a while back that the Chrome OS is meant to be coming out around this time and should be available on some netbooks.

However, Engadget have also reported that it will be Atom-powered with only around 65,000 units available to Google’s closest “friends and families” so it would appear that the Chrome OS is still very much in beta form. Perhaps this announcement will be aimed at getting the OS into the hands of developers.

Google’s release of Chrome 8 the other day is also another step towards the Chrome OS coming to market. It launches with support for the Chrome Web/App store due to come very soon, it will probably come along with the Chrome OS since those apps make up a very large part of the cloud operating system.

It’s fairly short notice on the announcement, it’s to be held in San Francisco but it also conflicts with the D: Dive Into Mobile conference which will be happening a few miles north on the same day, so either Google planned this badly or did it on purpose.

So what do you think we will see, a release of a Chrome OS netbook or just the OS itself?

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Microsoft took a public relations battering this week when they announced that one of the most useful features in the OS, Drive Extender, a technology that allows you to add ever growning numbers of hard disks to a pool of data storage, was being ditched because they couldn’t resolve data corruption bugs.

Now, the largest maker of Windows Home Server systems, HP, has announced that it is dropping the product from its line-up.  The company will stop selling its MediaSmart Server line at the end of 2010 and will not be updating to the new version of the OS when it is released.

In a statement Microsoft said ”This news is in no way related to recent announcements about feature changes in Windows Home Server ‘Vail’”, though of course they probably would say that.  They go on to say “Vail will have a big impact on the home media environment, providing an easy streaming and seamless digital file sharing experience for consumers, and Acer is excited to be alongside Microsoft delivering on this goal” says Gianpiero Morbello, Acer Group Corporate Vice President Marketing & Brand.”

The Drive Extender story has been bad for Microsoft and extremely bad for users of the software.  That said it doesn’t mean that existing version of Home Server will suddenly stop working, though anyone with large amounts of storage might want to avoid upgrading to the newest version of the OS when it finally arrives next year.

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Time really does seem to fly, Windows 95 seems to be a bleak memory now when you think back to it, but what about Windows 1.0. Yes number 1, the very first attempt at creating the foundations for what we now see on nearly every desktop in the world.

It was on this day, 20 November 25 years ago that Microsoft had their first stab at creating a multi-tasking graphical user interface to run on desktops. Of course it resembled nothing like what it is today. However you may find it has one or two things in common with some other Windows OS’s now that I think about it.

For a start it was two years late, finally shipping on November 20th 1985 when Bill Gates himself announced it at the Plaza Hotel in New York. It was the next big thing, it was cool, it was graphical, it was going to put those Apple systems to shame, which was purely text based at the time.

Windows 1.0 was the birthplace of actual “windows” on your computers, up until now all files and documents were purely text based, where as Windows arranged them into, well , windows….. this was the big step forward.

Of course Microsoft were laughed at for a while, it wasn’t exactly a looker and it wasn’t jam packed full of features. There was no recycle bin in sight and the Windows couldn’t even overlap. However, some early versions of Windows 1 came bundled with Microsoft Word and Excel, something you’d never see anymore. The program list may look somewhat familiar to you though, a good few of these have managed to survive the tests of time and are still running on your brand new Windows 7 OS today.

Supplied programs included the Calculator, Calendar, Cardfile, Clipboard viewer, Click, Control Panel, Notepad, Paint, Reversi, Terminal and Write.

Microsoft may have hit a few bumps in the road since Windows 1 was released, but since then things have all gone up hill, Microsoft is now one of the biggest companies in the world and its OS is running on 90% of desktops around the world, and all after 25 short years.

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It is well known that there are many security threats to users and computers across the Internet. Even Google has experienced hits, like the one that occurred earlier in the year. Now Google is trying to anticipate any vulnerabilities by rewarding hackers to find and report those weaknesses.

Google Security

Google recently paid two $1,337 bounties for work that lets Chrome avoid critical security problems by sidestepping vulnerabilities in Windows and the widely used glibc software library. Google is serious about this.  So recently, Google gave payments to people who found three high-risk vulnerabilities on the browser and one medium-risk vulnerability. A low-risk problem, brought no payment.

From the blog post, Google said this:

1. “The maximum reward for a single bug has been increased to $3,133.7. We will most likely use this amout for SecSeverity-Critical bugs in Chromium. The increased reward reflects the fact that the sandbox makes it harder to find bugs of this severity.
2. Whilst the base reward for less serious bugs remains at $500, the panel will consider rewarding more for high-quality bug reports. Factors indicating a high-quality bug report might include a careful test case reduction, an accurate analysis of root cause, or productive discussion towards resolution.”

Some Examples

Here are some examples of security vulnerabilities that Google considers worth paying for.

Anyone who finds issues such as cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Google properties including Google Docs, YouTube, Orkut, Blogger, and Gmail. However, at this time it doesn’t include software that runs on local computing devices such as Picasa,  Android, and Sketchup. Although it may go in that direction later.

Also there are some exclusions.  For example, some types of problems, such as social engineering and denial-of-service attacks aren’t eligible for rewards. And if the bug finder lives  in North Korea, Cuba,   Sudan, Iran, and Syria, forget it, they aren’t eligible for legal reasons.

Source: Google

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Harckers, security researchers at the ToorCon security conference in San Diego showed how easy it can be to poke holes in hardware and software with the right combination of tools, know-how, and good old fashioned cat curiosity.

What hacks did the show?

One researcher demonstrated how to take control of an iPhone using an App exploit that targets a hole in Safari. That vulnerability is now fixed. The iPhone app allowed it to process credit card numbers, which could then be stolen if this were an attack in the wild.

A senior security analysts at Trustwave, “weaponized” an exploit called Jailbreakme.com. It would allow iPhone owners to use unauthorized apps. You can eavesdrop on someone if you’re on their iPhone.

Two researchers talked about how they turned a toy into a wireless tool that could be used to open garage doors and clone RFID -based passports and RFID tags used for inventory control on shipping docks. The device they used was the IM-ME.  The IM-Me device uses the same wireless chip that some smart meters use and could be turned into a diagnostic tool to test the security of those devices.

Two other presenters showed how when accessing popular sites on the Web like Twitter, Hotmail, Facebook, and Flickr where there is limited encryption puts user accounts at risk of compromise by someone snooping on session traffic between the user’s computer and the site’s server.

Finally, it is easy to compromise cookie data. Black Hat hackers can compromise cookies. Exposure is possible even when web surfers are not on one of the sites that uses their cookies. If a site just even has a Flickr image embedded or hosts a Facebook or Twitter widget it can leak a user’s cookie data if the user is logged into the relevant host site. The cookie allows you to do everything you can with a password,  In such a circumstance it is hard for users to protect themselves.

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In September, Google launched a new program, the Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators. At that time is was labeled as an “experimental tool.” It sent e-mail notifications administrators running their own networks to receive information, which pointed out bad URLs if Google’s automated scanners find malicious content.

Phishing Site - Enticing Users

Well, the experimental version is over. Google has now added notification for phishing URLs to its service. It  warns administrators if their networks have been compromised.

Some network administrators may not be responsible for running websites on their networks, nevertheless, the program allows them to notify those who do. It informs them that the sites are infected and they need to have them cleaned. What hackers can do is compromise a poorly secured website in order to place malicious content or set up a phishing site; the latter may even be unknown to the website operator. That’s risky and dangerous for website owners. They may find their sites blacklisted without their knowledge.

Adwords Phishing

A phishing site tries to elicit personal information from a victim, usually this done by tricking the visitor to the site into believing that the page they’ve landed on is legitimate.

Now Google has gone a step further in malware protection by adding notification of phishing URLs to the e-mail warnings it sends to administrators.

While these advances are important, it is important to realize that there is usually a short time period before the site is either blacklisted or shut down. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome browser has the “safe browsing” technology built in. This will block users from going to potentially harmful websites on the blacklist.

Another feature is that in the messaging element the notification can be sent in XML data format. This permits administrators to process the notification using scripts to automate other functions.

Administrators can register their networks on Google’s Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators site.

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Many PC’s come with pre-installed software from manufacturers, most of it is bloatware and useless to the majority of users. A lot of it never really seems to work right, or you have to sign up to something or it’s only a limited trial. My advice, get rid of it all, you’ve got a new PC, let’s start with a clean slate and keep it running as fast as it was the day you got it.

So that brings me on nicely to the first piece of software.

Revo Uninstaller Free Version

Revo used to be completely free but recently they’ve decided they want to make a bit of money, however they still offer their original free one for free, and you can buy a more advanced paid pro version if you wish, but you shouldn’t need it.

Revo uninstaller allows you to uninstall any program on your machine quickly, but what makes this different from your built in uninstaller is that it removes all the leftover files as well. So often when you uninstall a program,it leaves behind files and un needed registry keys which are hard to track down and manually delete. Revo will do this for you quickly and easily,

Download it here

Google Chrome

I know many people have their own favourite browser, be it Firefox or Internet Explorer. But I’m strongly suggesting to all of you to give Google Chrome a go. It’s so quick and clean, light and easy to use its ridiculous. There’s just no waiting around with it, and it also has the option to add themes, extensions and nothing seems to slow it down.

It’s constantly being updated by the Google team, and you know if it’s from Google they’ve lots of resources to pump into it

Download it here

GIMP

This has to be one of my favourite programs. If you are ever doing any graphic design of any sort, or just want to mess around with a picture, GIMP is your tool.

Many people splash out and spends hundreds buying photoshop, but why would you do that if there was an equally good alternative for free? GIMP can do everything that photoshop does, but it’s free. Yes the UI may be slightly different, but there’s nothing that you can’t really do with it.

It’s well worth a look at it you’re planning on doing any photo editing or graphic design.

Download it here

Microsoft Security Essentials

Normally when you buy a computer you will either get antivirus pre-installed, or you will get a trial version of one. My advice, unless you’ve been given a full copy of a program, uninstall it and install Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s one of the best antivirus programs out there and does just as good, if not a better job than all the other antivirus suites. It’s free, it’s light and you don’t even know its installed on your system, but it does it’s job. A must have for me

Download it here

CCleaner

Again another great little program for maintaining your PC. It’s great to just run this program every two weeks or so just to keep on top of things.

It will clean up any unnecessary files hanging around on your machine and even have a look through your registry for any files that shouldn’t be there that are just filling up your PC with junk.

Think of it as a detox for your computer

Download it here

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The latest Microsoft Press book “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” will be available to buy within two weeks and it’s been written by one of the editors/regular contributors here at you’re favourite Internet website, ConnectedInternet.co.uk.

You can still download a free sample chapter from the book HERE, in which you can find out about the core Windows 7 files and folders, how to repair specific files within the operating system and how to create a slipstreamed install DVD that includes Service Pack 1!

Now we have some even more exciting news.  Starting on Monday 18th October 2010 and running for a period of one week we have a fantastic and exclusive competition for readers of www.windows7news.com and www.ghacks.net, so scoot over there to enter on Monday.

We’ll be giving away three copies of the book in paperback and ten copies of the eBook!  PLUS!  Every winner and runner up will also receive an eBook of The Windows 7 Power Users Guide by the same author as a bonus prize.

That’s a whopping 52 prizes on Windows7News.com and gHacks.net!

Check www.windows7news.com and www.ghacks.net on Monday for full details of the competition and how you can enter to win.

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Apple seem to have gone fairly quiet on the Mac front over the last couple of months and have mainly just been focusing on iOS. We barely got a mention about OS X at previous press events, and we’ve begun to question Apples commitment to Mac.

Apple have just brought Mac back into the picture however with this press event that they have planned for October 20th at 10am in the Town Hall on Apple’s Campus in Cupertino California.

Invitations to the event entitled “Back to the Mac” began showing up earlier today.

So what can we expect to see Apple announce?

OS X Update

OS X is long overdue an update I think if it wants to keep up with Windows 7 and the likes, a refresh is in order. If the image in the press invitation is anything to go by, the next Mac OS could well be named “Lion”. Mac users have felt rather ignored over the past several months with all the iOS talk about iPads and iPhones, Macs seem to have been given the long finger.

New MacBook Air

The MacBook Air hasn’t got an update in ages, it’s screaming out for an update at this stage and since Apple love the ultrathin masterpiece, I’m expecting them to go to work on their 13 inch beauty.

Intel Core i3 and i5?

The MacBook Pros were updated six months ago and are on target for a refresh. The larger MacBook pros feature i3 and i5 processors, but the smaller 13-inch model has yet to get the upgrade. So I’d expect to see an update to that at the very least.

New Nvidia Graphics

Apple has pretty decent graphics in its current line of MacBooks, but they could be better. Especially the MacBook Pro 15 and 17 inch models, these more expensive models should be packing a bit more punch than they currently do in the graphics department.

What do you think Apple will have to say?

Let us know in the comments

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There’s been huge amounts of speculation about exactly when Microsoft would officially unveil Windows Phone 7 but now we finally have the date.  At a pre-announced event in New York City on October 11th, the company has said this will be the launch date after all.

Several technology bloggers, including Paul Thurrott, had said that October 11th wouldn’t be the date as Microsoft had an event in New York this time every year.  People after this began talking about October 25th.

The event will be held at the Microsoft Technology Center and kick off at 3pm EST.   There will be a five minute keynote, a 20 minute presentation on the new smartphone OS and finally an hour of practical demonstrations and Q&As with staff from T-Mobile.

This is a very exciting launch for Microsoft and for phone consumers and it’s guaranteed to reinvigorate the smartphone market, giving both Apple and Google something to worry about at the same time.  What will make it harder for Apple and Google in the run up to the all important Christmas sales period is the reported $1bn that Microsoft are throwing at promoting Windows Phone 7 worldwide.

It will be interesting to see how the new OS is received by the press and how well the launch goes as smartphone manufacturers have yet to officially announce any products and negotiations with carriers are still ongoing.

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Yesterday I covered information about websites and Internet activity to avoid. Here are some more “watch out”  items.

Watch out for Fake Antivirus programs

Watch for sites that have fraudulent ads that will lead you to scams or malware.

While it is true that ads pay the bills, or fun websites, some ads are just scams. To avoid them, don’t click ads that will direct you to a commonly used and friendly website. If you get an ad to upload information to your bank account, go to the bank and look at their instructions there. The ad won’t be there at all.

Watch for Facebook Apps that look questionable.

While face book has a large following, and many apps appear there to make your social networking more pleasant, some are there to take advantage of your friendliness. Be selective about which Apps you add to your profile Check your privacy settings for Facebook Apps, and don’t add all Apps automatically.

Watch for sites that try to lure you in and sign up, then transfer your e-mail address for spam.

Be doubtful of the adds that promise you a free iPad or a free notebook! These sites are not dangerous by themselves, but personal information could be sold to other sites and businesses, who can then use it to sell stuff to you.

Watch for phishing on social networks that trick you into downloading malware or worse still giving your Facebook login information to others

Sites like Facebook give rise to new forms of phishing. For example, scammers might hijack a Facebook account, then use it to lure that person’s friends into clicking a friendly link but is not and going to spam sites, or even giving up their Facebook login information.

Finally, watch what you say and disclose.

After all, this is the Internet, and anything that you say or report about yourself can be read by anyone anywhere around the world. Let me put it this way, if you would not disclose certain things about yourself to your neighbors, then perhaps the same rule applies to the neighbors on the Web.

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Dangerous Websites

From time to time, everyone reading this has come across a website that caused them some problems. The site infected their computer, or they were asked to pay for a virus remover program (which the site put on), and so on.

Here is a short list of websites or activities you should avoid.

Watch Sites that use Flash

Adobe’s Flash software, while entertaining, has become a malware target in recent years, forcing Adobe to push out frequent security patches. The solution: keep your updates current.

Watch Shortened Links – Twitter

Anyone who has used Twitter knows about the 140 character limit. There are ways to shorten up the links in Twitter so you can write something and attach the link. This can pose a problem, because hackers can hide their site using the shortened link. But if you must go there then use TweetDeck or Tweetie for Mac that will allow you to see the link before you go there.

Watch for install malware or give up personal info via e-mail or attachments

Infected e-mail attachments and phishing and are nothing new, the lures that cyber hacks use are keep changing. Sometimes phony messages are becoming more difficult to distinguish from legitimate ones. So watch your inbox, and don’t click anything that you’re are not sure off.

Watch the torrent sites

Torrent sites, like BTJunkie, or PirateBay are a source for downloading videos, music, and software. But many times the files are creeping with malware. Avoid them as best as possible.

Watch out for photos or videos of nude or near nude women

Yes, I’m talking about porn sites. Some are running legitimate businesses hoping to attract and retain customers, but others are scamming sites. Moreover, it is hard to tell which is which. So be careful about what you download. You can use LinkScanner or SiteAdvisor to weed out malicious sites.

Watch for Video codecs, infecting your PC with malware

Many times videos online may need support from a video codec. This is a small piece of software, which provides support for a video file. Many are quite legitimate, but others can cause problems because they expect you to download them. Avoid video download sites, and peer-to-peer networks

See: TrendMicro for a detailed description.

Watch Your Smartphone

Making calls can alert others about where you are. Because many mobile phones now carry Apps, they can be subjects of malware, or spyware, getting information about you. Watch what you say, and what you download. Make sure you have encryption turned on.

Watch for poisoned search engine results.

Sometimes a search engine result may take you to a malware-carrying website, even if the results look legitimate. It may be tougher to identify valid search results from invalid ones, but look at what they are displaying.

Watch for PDFs that try to get you into installing malware

While Microsoft is more serious about Windows security would-be attackers have had to look for new ways to infect PCs. So attacking flaws in Adobe Acrobat has become one of these newer techniques.

Watch for video files using flaws in player software to hijack PCs

Attackers have exploited flaws in video players such as QuickTime Player to attack PCs. The threats originate from “malformed” video files that, like malicious PDFs, trigger bugs in the player software. They let the attackers in to spy on you, plant other malware, and cause more problems.

Watch for drive-by downloads that could install malware when you visit a site

Most of the time we are aware of the files that we download; even updates or security patches from Microsoft come with notifications. But, a drive-by download occurs when a file downloads and worse installs to your PC without you realizing it. Such downloads can happen just about anywhere.

This is the end of Part 1; tomorrow I will finish with Part 2.

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Lately I’ve been reporting on several malware attacks that have hit various businesses. Twitter was hit over the weekend, and Microsoft disclosed a vulnerability on its ASP programming environment last week. Now Microsoft has announced that the security flaw on its ASP .NET is so serious that they are releasing a patch on September 28^th.

The vulnerability, which exposes ASP.net applications to information disclosure attacks, was publicly discussed at this year’s ekoparty security conference in Argentina. Microsoft says there are ongoing attempts to bypass existing workarounds.

What does the attack do?

An attacker can decrypt cookies, view states, form authentication tickets, identify membership passwords, see user data, and anything else encrypted using the ASP.NET framework’s API. These issues are significant because the vulnerabilities exploited affect the .NET framework, which is used by 25 percent of Web sites on the Internet.

What is Microsoft Doing About it?

The Microsoft Security Response Center says it will ship an emergency update with a severity rating of “important” for all versions of the .NET Framework when used on Windows Server operating systems.  According to Microsoft the security update is fully tested and ready for release, however, it will be made available initially only on the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft hopes that this way, they are able to get the update out as quickly as possible. Furthermore, it will allow administrators with enterprise installations, or end users working with the .NET framework environment, and who want to install this security update manually, the ability to test and update their systems as quickly as possible. After a few days, Microsoft intends to make the release available through the Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services to make sure distribution will be successful through these other channels. This dual approach will allow Microsoft to release the update patch sooner to customers who may choose to deploy it manually without delaying for broader distribution.

Source: Microsoft

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Asp.Net

For more information see:   Microsoft

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While Apple may have to largest App Store out there, it seems that Android has the cheapest one. According to App Store analytics provider Distimo found once again that Google’s Android Market has by far the largest share of free applications compared to other mobile app stores.

What’s more this trend is growing, In July 60% of all apps on the Android Market were free, which was up 3% from May 2010. They even put together some nice charts for us so we can see that Android has pretty much double the number of free apps of all the other app stores.

Windows Marketplace has the lowest number of free apps at 22%, followed by the iPad app store at 26%. The iPhone app store only has 29% of it’s apps available for free.

Distimo also has a closer look at the paid apps and finds that the average price of the 100 most popular apps in Android Market and Palm’s App Catalog is higher than the average price of the entire catalogue of applications.

However, the average price of apps on the Apple and iPad APp store is 16% higher but its average price of the 100 most popular applications is nearly three times as high than that of Android.

The success of app stores has mainly been because of how cheep and cheerful these apps have been. And when you look at the pricing structure for all the app stores, 60% of the apps are all priced under $2.

It seems that developers for iOS devices are looking for a bit more revenue as prices of these apps are on the rise. The proportion of paid applications priced below $1 on the Apple App Store for iPad and Apple App Store for iPhone has decreased in both in July 2010, from 30% to 25% and from 49% to 45%

I think another reason why the Android app store has so many more free and cheaper apps is because only a couple of select countries have the paid apps available to them. For instance I have no access to paid apps in Ireland, only the free ones. Google say they’re working on rolling out the paid apps to the rest of the world, but as usual legal stuff is holding them back.

As a result developers are more willing to give away there apps because they know they will reach a larger market, and potentially make more money from adverts etc…

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BitDefender, one of the most recognizable virus protection programs was subjected to some scrutiny by Virus Bulletin in August. The result was failure. Virus Bulletin showed 15 false positives in the results.

Virus Bulletin gives a VB100 award to a company whose virus checking program passes certain tests.

• It detects all In the Wild viruses during both on-demand and on-access scanning.
• It generates no false positives when scanning a set of clean files.

The product that is tested  must fulfil these criteria in its default state.

Virus Bulletin publishes its results of it virus tests and this time the operating system in question was Vista Business edition with service pack 2. Here are the results

Virus Bulletin

As you can see Avast did well in the August test, and has done well in the four previous ones, including the Windows 7 Test.

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The testing provided by Virus Bulletin is objective in so far as the same test is applied to all of the software that is presented to them. All tests are performed both on demand and on access.  The failure to detect a sample from the WildList set, in either mode, or a false positive alert in either mode, will result in a product failing to qualify for the VB100 award.

Source: Virus Bulletin

Wildlist

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Choosing a secure password to use online is second only in difficulty to knowing if that password is really secure or not.  I thought I’d share with you two tools that can make choosing a secure password easy, and that would help you find out just how secure the password(s) you use at the moment really are.

How Secure is My Password is a simple little site that checks your current password and reports back on how long it might take an average modern desktop computer to crack it.  There’s nothing on this site to identify you.  There’s no log-in or account needed so there’s no way for the site to ever be able to associate your password with any username or email address.

To use the site all you need to do is type your password into the white box on the screen and it will immediately report back on how long it would take to secure your password.

Simple dictionary words and names can be cracked in a matter of seconds using brute-force methods.  Adding a year or date of birth will make it more secure but it’s still something that a password cracker will check for early on.

Adding random characters such as * or & and subst1tuting numb3rs for letters can make the password more secure still but there’s no substitute for having a really long password, ten characters or more if you can do so.

PasswordCard is a site for people who really do want a secure password and don’t mind a little inconvenience to get it.  The site will auto generate an image (one example is seen here) with completely random characters and two keys.

The first key is again random images along the top, the latter is a more conventional numbering up the side of the card.

You can print out your card (my advice would also be to save a copy or two in case you lose it).  You then choose a random character along the top, a number down the side and decide how long your password should be.

You now have a super-secure password and even if somebody gets hold of your password card, they’d never find your password hidden within it.

I’d always recommend having a secure password and these two sites can help keep you safe and secure on your computer and on-line.

Thanks to James Lidster for the tip

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Word on the web, courtesy of the downloadsquad is that Google and Verizon are teaming up to launch a tablet device, built by HTC to launch on November 26th.

Apparently they’ve got a source that confirms this information, that a tablet set to rival the iPad will be running the Chrome OS from Google and is being built by HTC, who also built the Nexus One for Google. Verizon are set to be the partners in this Chrome OS Tablet and is set to launch on Black Friday, November 26th, the busiest shopping day of the year in the US.

We’re also been told that it will be heavily subsidized on contract to Verizon and will be way cheaper than the iPad, and may even be free if you’re lucky. Hardware wise, we’re looking at a device with Nvidias Tegra 2 chips and sporting a 1280×720 multitouch display, 2GB of RAM, minimum 32GB SSD, WiFi/Bluetooth/LTE connectivity, GPS, webcam, and possibly expandable storage via a multi-card reader.

Now this sounds great and all, but there’s some questions being raised here. Of course it’s plausible that Verizon and Google are teaming up to release a tablet, but I’m not sure if the Chrome OS is even ready to be released that soon. I mean we haven’t seen it on any other devices to date. But then again Google could be using this device to debut their new OS.

Secondly, Engadget has other information to report, their sources tell them that Google and Verizon are planning on releasing a tablet, but it’s not due to appear until late 2011, or so they say. Also these specs that we’re being told seem to be made up and aren’t coming from any source that we can see.

And hey, this is the first time we’ve caught wind of a Google Tablet with Verizon, and there seems to be too much information for this to be true.

What do you think? Is it for real?

Let me know in the comments

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With multi-touch gesture support absolutely everywhere now, it was only a matter of time before the largest Linux distributor, Ubuntu, announced it’s inclusion in their next version.  Now their founder Mark Shuttleworth has made that very announcement.

The feature will be available in Ubuntu 10.10 from October and will support up to four fingered usage.  In a statement on his website, Shuttleworth said…

The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”. The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions. It’s not quite the difference between banging rocks together and conducting a symphony orchestra, but it feels like a good step in the right direction

Clearly what we’ve seen with multi-touch so far has only just scratched the surface (no pun intended) and there are many more exciting things that can be done with it in the future to help, not only the mass market, but the disabled and very young children to engage and interact with computers in new and exciting ways.

This new feature will form part of Canonical’s UTouch Framework and will run on any device with a multi-touch screen.

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I know many of you may be shouting at me now saying, “Why do you even use IE in the first place!” Well first off, don’t worry, I don’t use it. I’m a Chrome user myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have IE installed on my machine and use it the odd time. I also know that the vast majority of web users use it and many people are forced to use it for work purposes etc…

We all know that IE isn’t exactly a speed daemon, especially when it comes to opening up new tabs, it just seems to crawl along. But there’s a reason for all this. It’s because of your add-ons, generally toolbars.

See this table below of the most popular IE add-ons sorted by the amount of slowness that they add to IE’s load times.

As you can see some of the most popular tool bars like AVG, AOL and even Windows Live are at the top of this table and are probably the main culprits for slowing down IE on you. Every time you load up IE you have to load up these tool-bars and add-ons as well, and they probably aren’t very well optimized for quick loading.

So how do you quickly speed up IE again? Simply disable these add-ons and toolbars and you should see a dramatic improvement.

One of the first ways to do this is to simply click the “X” on the far left of toolbars and this will disable them.

And the other way to disable toolbars as well as other add-ons is to go to tools and then manage add-ons.

You will then be able to see the toolbars and other add ons installed, as well as there load times. You can then disable whatever ones you dont want from here and you should see a decrease in IE’s load time.

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