How to Set Up Your Wireless Router for Skype – Skype is a modern marvel of communication, but even diehard users have to admit the quality can be uneven. Turns out there is a lot you can do to improve the quality of your Skype calls by just configuring you router a little differently.
10 Must-Have Android Apps (updated) – I have been updating this story for a few years now as the app landscape shifts. With this edition, I had to say goodbye to Astrid Task Manager and Advanced Task Killer; they just don’t make the cut anymore. The good news is that I have replaced them with apps that you will use every day and thank me for recommending.
How to Locate Your Unprotected Android Device – If you lose your Android smartphone and didn’t proactively install a security or remote locator app, you can still find your missing phone by following our handy guide.
Web Tracking: Is this a Big Deal? – Web tracking companies say anonymous tracking is harmless. What’s the real story? Here are two scenarios where online tracking can come back to bite you.
Facebook Gold Membership Status scam hits users – A bizarre email purportedly sent by Facebook has been hitting inboxes around the world and trying to convince the recipients that they have been awarded a “100% Gold Status membership” and $2.5 millions from the social network:
5 Welcome Page Apps to Customize Facebook Business Pages – Does your Facebook Business page look like all the rest? We’ve got five Facebook apps to help you create a custom page and help your business stand out from the Facebook crowd.
Create or Improve Your Own Websites Using These Great Tools – More than ever before, it is easy to create content online and get your message out into the world. Many tools let you create beautiful websites, both personal and business-oriented, without writing a single line of code. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned Web developer, here are some of the best tools and services available for putting your content online today.
Anonymous Hacks FTC Sites, Again – Websites owned by the Federal Trade Commission and the Bureau of Consumer Protection were hacked on Thursday night and have taken down, the FTC confirmed Friday.
Report: Apple Supplier Foxconn Raises Worker Pay at Chinese Plants – Beset by criticism of its labor practices, the contract manufacturing giant hikes monthly wages by 16 to 25 percent at the Chinese plants where iPhones and iPads are assembled.
Lawmakers Grill DHS Over Social Network Monitoring – House lawmakers grilled Department of Homeland Security officials this week over the agency’s monitoring of social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
What You Need to Know About Mountain Lion – If you want a really deep dive into Mountain Lion, you should read Ed Mendelson’s full preview, but if you just want the key takeaways, this story is for you. Although Mountain Lion doesn’t bring a lot of new architecture changes to the OS, there are a lot of new features for consumers.
Company News:
Trend Micro makes HijackThis open source – Trend Micro released HijackThis as an open source application. The code, originally written in Visual Basic, is now officially available at SourceForge. Trend Micro will continue to maintain the original source code and will update the base code on SourceForge as developers make modifications that are essential and positive to the continued improvement of this code.
Intel Cyrstal Forest Takes Aim at the Networking Market – A key part of the attractiveness of the Crystal Forest platform for WAN acceleration is a technology called Quick Assist, which helps to accelerate secure packet payloads up to as much as 100 Gbps.
Forensic toolkit with malware analysis technology – AccessData released Forensic Toolkit 4 (FTK) that gives organizations affordable access to more advanced incident response and remote investigative capabilities. Using FTK, computer forensics examiners are able to securely and remotely investigate a running computer to analyze and collect data from disk, volatile and RAM, eliminating travel and reducing response time.
Red Hat Takes Aim at the Open Cloud with Deltacloud – A key part of being open in the cloud as is the case in every other segment of IT, is preventing vendor lock-in. One way that Red Hat is helping to prevent vendor lock-in is by way of the Deltacloud project which was started back in 2009. The project was moved to The Apache Software Foundation in 2010 as an incubated effort and now it has finally graduated to become a top level project.
Webopedia Daily:
GNOME 3 – A desktop graphics environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Released in April 2011, GNOME 3 served as a major update for the GNOME project and was the first major release in nine years.
Off Topic (Sort of):
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today – From 1970s minicomputers used for military programs (including nuclear weapons) to an IBM punch-card system still keeping the books at a Texas filter supplier, these are the computers that time forgot.
Over Half a Million People Join the Internet Every Day And Half of That Half Million Are Chinese – According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the UN the world population stands at almost exactly 7 billion human beings and according to ICT Facts and Figures more than a third of us are now connected to the Internet. And according to a study conducted by the folks over at Royal Pingdom there are almost 8 people joining the Web every second. Looking at the chart they provided that I’ve posted here, you can see that means over 683,000 people become new Web users every day. And half of that number speak Chinese.
Fallegi Skagafjörður – Wonderful. Made me feel like donning my bearskin, pushing out the longboat, and invading somewhere. (recommended by Michael F.)
How Google Comes Out Cleaner Than Apple on Privacy – This comes a week after Google spent a couple weeks being demonized for its planned privacy policy changes, which go into effect next month. Protest was so strong it attracted the unwanted attention from Congress–which, while generally ignorant on high-tech affairs, is quick to come down on any perceived slight or injustice to consumers.
Today’s Quote:
“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”
– Vaclav Havel
Today’s Free Downloads:
UltraVNC 1.0.9.6.2 – UltraVNC is an easy to use computer program that can display a screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your screen. UltraVNC will allow users you to use their mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.
Face Off Max 3.4.0.8 – Transplant your face to any body you want and let your friends share your fun! Comes packed with large and larger numbers of templates, Face Off Max aims at helping you to create funny photos by transplanting any face to any body and share the fun with your friends.
McAfee AVERT Stinger – Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system.
