5 Easy Tips That Would Protect You Against A Computer Hacker

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen many technological advancements. In fact, the advancements have been so quick that even tech-savvy individuals can end up falling by the wayside. I speak from experience.

There is a downside to this technological growth speed, though. Hackers. People who create malicious software in order to inflict harm against users. Sometimes, the malicious software is made to steal valuable information, like credit card numbers. It’s always a pain in the butt when you have to deal with such an experience.

Keep yourself protected with these easy tips on how to thwart most hacking attempts. Some effort and learning may be required, but you’ll thank yourself in the long run.

Install Protective Software

While firewalls and antivirus software sound important, they are not 100% effective. Antivirus software in particular is a reactionary defense, meaning it can protect against known infections, but there will always be new and improved versions of a virus that can bypass even the most up-to-date defenses.

There are 2 main types of protective software when it comes to Internet safety – network firewalls and antivirus software. A firewall is something that protects your private network from being accessed by an outsider. Antivirus software protects your personal computer from malicious infections.

Here are some awesome security tools that you should know about.

Update Your Operating System

When companies like Microsoft and Apple release newer versions of their operating systems, they aren’t just adding new features and improving aesthetics. One of the big selling points of having the latest operating system is that security vulnerabilities are patched.

Again, no operating system will ever be 100% exploit-proof. However, you can greatly increase your protection against malicious attacks by patching to the latest versions when available.  The Microsoft patches can be accessed via Windows Update (or in the case of Vista and Windows 7, via your Start Menu).

Avoid Shady & Unreliable Websites

There are some sites that you know you can trust simply because they are owned and operated by a reliable and reputable company. For example, you know that a website like CNN or MakeUseOf wouldn’t try to install malware on your computer. However, there are some sites that would. Try to avoid visiting websites that you are unfamiliar with.

If you want to visit a site but aren’t sure of its reputability, you can use a service like Web of Trust. Web of Trust will rate websites based on certain criteria and tell you how trustworthy they are based on user experiences.

At the end of the day, you should never click on any links that you do not trust fully.

Avoid Unsolicited Email Attachments

If you’re using email in this day and age, you likely have some sort of filter set up to whisk away those pesky spam emails. Gmail will do this for you by default. However, sometimes an email will get past the filters and you’ll be none the wiser.

The best course of action would be to refrain from even opening unsolicited emails. However, for sure, you should neveropen an email attachment if you don’t know the person sending it. Even if you do know the person, you shouldn’t open an attachment if you weren’t expecting it – sometimes viruses propagate by hijacking an email address and spreading to their contacts.

Opening a malicious email can infect your system without your knowledge or permission. Then, before you know it, your computer crashes and won’t boot up. Or something like that. Just avoid opening unsolicited emails and you’ll be good to go.

Never Leave Your Computer Unattended

This is more of a common sense suggestion than the previous tips, but it’s still important. Never leave your computer unattended, especially if you’re in a public place.

First of all, if you’re alone in public, then someone might steal your computer. But even if they don’t, they could play a prank on you and visit a shady site on your browser. Friends and family can be equally likely to play a prank on your computer.

At the very least, lock your screen. If you don’t want to do that, then take it with you! Try not to leave your computer in a vulnerable location where anyone could fool around with it (or take it).


source : View the original article here

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Why An Augmented Reality Future (Google Project Glass) Scares Me [Opinion]

At the beginning of April Google unveiled Project Glass, a new effort to bring smartphone functionality to your eyeball(s). And that’s not me overstating the case. This is a HUD (Heads-Up Display) offering augmented reality, and it’s in development right now at Google HQ.

We have already heard from James how this technology is perfectly feasible, and that the concept video Google proferred isn’t pie-in-the-sky thinking. Chris then detailed why he loves the ideaof a future in which we’re all walking around with Google glasses stuck to our faces. I’m not so keen at this early stage, and here are the reasons why an augmented reality future powered by Google scares me.

Always On the Grid

I work online and love the Internet for many, many reasons. It helps me pay my bills, it has educated and entertained me in equal measure, and become a big presence in my life. But I’ve tried not to make it an indelible part of my life, and I try to take at least one day off the grid every week. It’s not long enough really, but it helps keep me connected with the real world, a world beyond the digital realm.

While it will undoubtedly be just as easy to remove a pair of Project Glass specs as it is to turn off a computer or ignore a smartphone, I’m not convinced people will, or will want to, do that. Once life with this layer of augmented reality is experienced, how many of us will actively choose to remove that layer in order to return to the usual, humdrum reality of just seeing what is in front of our faces?

I fear people will choose to remain on the grid at all times, attached to the Internet, but detached from the wider world that life itself offers.

Distraction = Ignorance

If the emergence of mobile technology has taught us anything it’s that people can be incredibly rude when distracted by something supposedly more interesting. I doubt there is anyone reading this who hasn’t had to suffer the ignominy of being ignored by someone who is too busy either ringing, texting, or emailing someone, or doing anything else on their smartphone or tablet. Unless I am very boring company.

Imagine for a moment how much worse this trend will be when we all start wearing augmented reality goggles. Information will be beamed right in front of our faces, even when we’re in the middle of a conversation. Have we got the capacity to ignore this in order to carry on conversing with each other? Or to be respectful in the midst of such a barrage of messages and images?

I fear Project Glass will lead to more distraction, and in turn, more ignorance. Our ability to focus on those around us is going to be severely tested by this technology.

Alone Together

The Internet has made the world a much smaller place. I know people from around the world, MakeUseOf has writers living on most continents, and generally speaking Earth is now a global village where physical location is of less importance than ever before. With this the idea of friendship and meaningful contact has changed, and not for the better.

Smartphones have already begun this trend of us being connected to the wider world while being disconnected with people standing next to us. And an augmented reality future is only going to make this worse. If I imagine a day when the majority of people are walking around wearing these things I see a day when we’re ignorant of our closest neighbors while communicating with someone on the other side of the planet. A form of self-initiated isolation.

I fear the online, digital realm will become the norm, at the expense of the people, places, and objects in our natural environment.

Don’t Be Evil

Google chose a mantra to live by in its early days. An informal corporate slogan which simply states, ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ It’s a great shorthand for what the company was supposed to be about. Unfortunately the company has had to bend the rules and break its own golden rule as it has grown into the behemoth we know it as today. Perhaps evil is a strong word to describe anything Google does, but some of its practices aren’t exactly wholesome or innocent.

Google already knows a lot about you and your online habits. With Google Search, Google+, and Google Android as mere starting points it has its eyes and ears everywhere. Alongside Facebook and others, it’s part of the culture of an erosion of privacy we’re all experiencing on the Web. With that in mind the last thing any of us should do is give Google access to our whole lives, which is what Project Glass would enable in a dystopian future.

Project Glass would enable Google to be involved in aspects of your life that are currently off-limits. They would know where you’re going, what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with. The default will likely be to have everything switched on to enable the full augmented reality experience. If you think Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policy is bad, imagine what the Project Glass privacy policy would be like as it evolved.

I fear getting the most out of Google’s technology will mean giving up any idea of privacy we’re currently desperately clinging on to.

De-evolution

The concept video Google delivered to herald the arrival of Project Glass shows someone relying on the device for almost everything. It’s reminding him of appointments, noting down concert dates, and giving him directions (even inside a book shop). All things we can already do with existing technology, granted, but with a new ease that means it will become standard practice.

Having this opportunity to bypass our brain’s own natural capacity to think, remember, learn, and adapt could mean laziness will set in. We have already lost the ability to do things our long-distant ancestors could do without a second thought. And that will happen once more should this technology one day reign supreme.

I fear the more reliant on technology we become the less we’ll be able to cope with even the simplest of tasks. De-evolution beckons.

Conclusions

I can guess how I will be perceived after writing this article. I’ll be labeled the same as those naysayers throughout history who have urged caution in the face of emerging technologies. But I’m comfortable with that. It’s not that I’m against Project Glass or that I believe it to be a folly. In fact, I believe this is the natural next step beyond smartphones and touchscreen tablets.

That doesn’t, however, make me incapable of seeing the possible downsides of Project Glass and the competing systems of wearable augmented reality guaranteed to show up over the next decade or so. Perhaps the positives will outweigh the negatives, some of which I have outlined above. But I remain unconvinced for the time being.

As always we welcome your comments on the article above. Do you agree or disagree with my views? Feel free to let me know either way. Opinion is free, discussion is good, debate is healthy.

source :  View the original article here

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How To QuicklyShare Beautiful Photo Galleries With Dropbox

One of the best ways to make use of the “dusty” pile of digital images on your hard drive is to share them with your friends and family. There are many ways to achieve that, such as sending them via email, uploading them to Facebook and/or Flickr, or setting up a photo gallery using WordPress to display the images.

All of those options above are fairly easy to set up and require a short amount of time to complete. But there’s nothing bad about having more options. I accidentally found one quick and easy method of sharing images when I was doing my How To Use Dropbox As Free Unblockable Image Storage For Your Blog article, and I’d like to share my findings with you.

Dropbox Photo Galleries?

If there’s one application that never ceases to amaze me with its untapped potential of usage variations, it would be Dropbox.  It seems like every time I shift my perspective a little bit, I find other ways to utilize it.

This time I found out how to set up and share quick and easy photo galleries using Dropbox. This feature is not exactly hidden, but it’s mixed among other things so that I didn’t really notice it.  Here’s how you can set up photo galleries of your own.

• Open your Dropbox folder on your computer and navigate to the “Photos” folder.

• Create one or more folders inside the Photos folder. Each of these folders will become one photo gallery/album. Then put and arrange your pictures inside those folders and wait for the upload process to finish.

That’s it, you’ve just built yourself several photo galleries. Congratulations.

Enjoying & Sharing The Galleries

It seems hard to believe that building a photo gallery is that easy. So it’s only natural if most users wonder about the quality of the result. Why don’t we take a peek then?

• Visit the Dropbox website under your account – or use the right click “Launch Dropbox Website” menu of the icon as a quick shortcut.

• Go to the “/photos” folder by clicking this link or by choosing “Photos – Gallery” from the drop down menu.

• You will see all of your photos grouped in albums/galleries. These albums are the folders inside your Dropbox “Photos” folder. Click one of the photo albums to view the content.

• Aside from the pictures, the album/gallery view will also provide you with the sharing link. You could copy the “Share this gallery with friends” link, paste it into an email (for example) and send it to your friends and family to share.

Clicking on one individual picture will open it in the cool “lightbox-style” display – where everything is darkened out except for the images that you focus on. At the upper right hand side of the page, there’s the link to play all of the photos within that album as a slideshow.

The size of the main image will always be adjusted to the size of the browser window. If you view the gallery using a small screen computer, the images will also be small. That’s why there are options to view the images in full size and to save the images on a computer’s hard disk.

If you want to close the album and move to the next one, click the “X” button at the upper right of the display.

One Additional Trick

Another alternative usage of these galleries – beside emailing your friends the share links, is to use them as redirection links of images in your blog post.

Upload one of the pictures in the photo album that you want to use in your post, and use the “share gallery” link in the “Link URL” field instead of the File URL of the image.

Now every time one of your blog readers clicks on the image, he/she will be taken to the shared Dropbox gallery. This is a great way to show a series of images on your blog while conserving the storage and bandwidth. Just be sure to set the gallery to be opened in another tab/window.

For something that you can build literally within seconds, these Dropbox Photo Galleries are so much better than decent. It’s perfect for those who want to quickly share their photo collections but don’t want to deal with the hassle of building the “usual” gallery. Plus, the images and the albums can be erased easily anytime you want just by deleting the folders inside your computer’s Dropbox “Photos” folder.

source :   View the original article here

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Take Beautiful Photos With Camera360 Free [Android 1.5+]

A few years back, a cellphone’s camera was little more  than a gimmick. It was just one more checkmark for the phone’s feature list – “it does pictures, too!” In recent times, though, we see more and more smartphones with 5 megapixel cameras, LED flashes, and processors powerful enough to create some very interesting images. What remains is the software – and as you may have noticed, this space is exploding with apps vying to be your default camera app. Camera360 received some very warm recommendations when we were collecting applications for our Best of Android page, so let’s take a closer look at it.

First, you should know that this review is about the free version (there’s also a paid Ultimateversion). When you launch the free version of this Android camera app, this is the first thing you’re going to see:

That’s right, a plug for the paid version. I force-closed the app to see if the screen shows up when I re-launch it, and it did. This would probably not be a serious issue for most users because the app would just run in the background, and you don’t get the nag screen when you switch to it. Still, it does make the initial launch not as snappy as it could be.

Next, the main screen:

Here you can select one of several looks (or “cameras”) to work with. Let’s try the Effectmode:

Here you get to select what effect you wish to apply to your photo before you take it. This is different than most similar apps, where you apply the effect post-factum. It’s an interesting approach. While it means you need to take an extra step before snapping your picture, you would have a better idea of what you’re going for when you take it. Let’s try the LOMO effect.

This is the capture screen. The live-preview looks rather jagged in the screenshot, but in real life it’s as smooth as you’d expect. This screen is chock-full of options; let’s take a quick look at some of them. When you tap the question-mark, a very helpful help layout pops up:

The most visible thing is probably the composition grid, which you can easily toggle off, or switch to a different grid style called “Modern core section” (a fancy name for a simple grid).

Tapping the cogwheel icon opens a menu with several options that you’d normally expect to find on a “real” camera:

You can select one of four different focus modes, choose one of three different options for recording location information along with your photo (GPS-based, cell-based, or no location information), and more. Fortunately, you can also mute the (loud) default beep the camera makes when it takes a photo.

Next, let’s look at the available Shooting Modes. The most useful one, to me, is the image stabilizer, which is off by default.

As you may have noticed, the English here isn’t perfect (Stabiliger? Brust?). This is even more visible in the options menu; the Ultimate version is selling quite well on the market – perhaps the developers can invest in some decent English localization. Brust means Burst mode, by the way. The camera just keeps on taking photos at regular intervals until you hit the shutter button to make it stop.

Last but not least on the capture screen are the Camera Settings:

You can easily adjust brightness, saturation, and several other parameters. Oh, right, I guess you can also tap the Camera button and take a picture (a minor option, but I figured I’d mention it anyway). Here’s what the image looks like:

Mind you, this is with the LOMO effect. You van also tweak the effect, but some of the options are paid-version only (those with the tiny shopping cart in the corner):

One you’re happy with your image, you can easily share and save it. Finally, when you quit the app, the developers can’t keep from plugging the paid version one more time:

Bottom Line

Camera360 is a robust, powerful Android camera app. I haven’t even touched on the image sharing options it offers or explored its other camera modes (Tilt-shift, Color-shift and more). Its two main drawbacks are the poor English in the UI (sometimes to the point of making things needlessly confusing), and the strong push for the paid version plastered all over the app. Still, the Free version is not time-limited, and is fully functional with plenty of filters and interesting image effects. All in all, a very capable app.

source :  View the original article here

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Keep Your Computer Clean & Tidy With WinPatrol Portable [Windows]

WinPatrol has always been one of my favourite pieces of free software.   It was one of the first things I wrote about when I joined MakeUseOf back in 2007 and it also made my Mark Pack exactly one year ago today.   It’s one of those security apps that you can always depend on and it has stopped many an intruder from sneaking onto my computer without my knowledge.

Now there is a portable version of the Windows-only software called Win Patrol To Go and this is good news for me.   I am increasingly using more portable USB software as I jump from computer to computer and I am also getting asked a lot to help fix peoples computers.   In these situations, apps like WinPatrol are your best friend.

One of the best functions of WinPatrol is being able to easily control the Start Menu programs.   It’s not good for your PC to have too many programs starting when you boot up, so using WinPatrol, you can enable and disable each startup program at will.

As the screenshot above shows, you can see the name of the startup program, its command (what it will look like in the Windows Task Manager) and the company it comes from (for easier identification).   I would recommend not touching any of the Microsoft programs as you never know what disabling them will do to your computer but you can skim through the other ones and disable any unneeded ones.   For example, you don’t need your chat programs launching on start-up.

One of the best features of the Startup Programs tab is that, if you keep WinPatrol constantly running in the background, it will shoot up a warning window on your screen if a software app tries to covertly add anything to your startup programs section.   It will also warn you if any of your file associations have been changed with the option to change them back again.   iTunes is a BIG offender at secretly changing all of your media file formats and thanks to WinPatrol, I am always able to quickly and easily change the files back again.

Here are brief summaries of WinPatrol’s other features :

ActiveX - shows a complete list of all the Internet Explorer ActiveX controls on your computer with the ability to disable any of them if there is a security vulnerability but no patch.  You can also filter out all the non-Microsoft entries for easier reading.

IE Helpers – some programs, when installed on your computer, also install “helper” buttons on your Internet Explorer toolbar.  You can use the IE Helpers section of WinPatrol to remove any of these buttons.

Scheduled Tasks – as the name suggests, it lists all the tasks currently scheduled byWindows Task Scheduler.  Using WinPatrol, you can get details about each one as well as cancel and remove them if necessary.

Services & Active Tasks – these tabs show you all the running services on your computer and again, you can filter out all the non-Microsoft ones for easier reading and navigation.   You can close any of these services from these WinPatrol tabs but again, exercise extreme caution.   It may look like a lot of programs but each one (at least the Microsoft ones) probably have a very important function to play in the running of your computer.

Hidden Files – again as the name suggests, this tab shows all the files marked as “hidden” on your Windows system.  Again, use extreme caution deleting any of these files as a lot of them are probably needed by Windows in order to function properly.

If you combine WinPatrol Portable with CCleaner Portable, then you will have two powerful tools to keep your Windows system clean and tidy.   Win Patrol should be on everyone’s computer.

source :   View the original article here

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