November 2014

Ever since the first webcams hit the market webcam hacking has been a topic. Hacks use security vulnerabilities, bad designs or carelessness to gain access to a cam's feed over a network or the Internet.

Webcam feeds of thousands of users were made available recently on a website on the Internet and this is just one public incident. It is likely that the majority of hacks don't get publicity at all.

There are counter-measures against hacks. From taping over the cam and microphone to not connecting it in first place.

If you want to know more about the connections that your operating system and the programs running on it makes, you have to look beyond what Windows itself is offering.

While you can use native tools to get some information, they are not easy to use and often not as useful as third-party tools that provide better information.

TCP Monitor Plus is a portable lightweight network monitor for Windows.

The program displays the various modules that it makes available in a tab row at the top.

When you play games in your web browser, one of the following four technologies is being used usually: Adobe Flash, Java, Unity or HMTL5.

There are exceptions to the rule but the majority relies on at least one of the technologies listed above. When it comes to Unity, it is necessary to install the Unity Web Player add-on on the system which web browsers pick up as a plugin.

DiskBoss refers to a line of hard drive management tools. This review looks at the freeware version of DiskBoss which is limited in comparison to the paid versions. More about that later.

After you have installed DiskBoss on your Windows machine and started it up, you get a list of all drives connected to the system.

Each drive is displayed with its letter and name, type, file system, total, used and free space, its status, and a quick tools link

Firefox users have several options when it comes to running searches. They can type a query in the browser's address bar, use the default search field, a search engine on a new tab page or open a search engine directly in the browser to use it.

Mozilla announced some major changes to the search component in Firefox. Not only did the organization decide to change from Google as the default global search engine to regional search engines, it also added the DuckDuckGo search engine as a default option to the browser.

I reviewed Imagus back in 2013 when the then popular extension Hoverzoom caused controversy in regards to scripts it ran that were not in any way related to enlarging images on the Internet.

Imagus came to same fame and many call it the best Chrome extension of its kind. The author of the extension ported it over to Firefox recently and it has been available for the web browser for a couple of months.

Automatic updates can be quite helpful at times. While some users prefer to download and install updates manually as it gives them more control over the process and options to test an update first before it is applied, it is without doubt the best option for users who don't do so.

While many programs ship with an automatic update feature or at least inform you when an update is available, this is not the case for all programs out there.

If you are using the to-do manager Wunderlist on a mobile device or the web you may find it interesting that it has been published for Windows 7 today.

The program brings the full experience to the Windows desktop and while the program looks like it is only a wrapper for the web interface, it runs quite well.

Mozilla launched a Developer Edition of Firefox recently. The main idea was to create a version of Firefox that is optimized for web development tasks.

It is separate from other versions of Firefox and Mozilla switched the theme of that version to reflect that. It is not the only indicator though. You can run the Developer version side by side with your regular version of Firefox and both will run fine.

I use a couple of image editing tools regularly to resize or edit images that I post here on this site. Other than that I don't use image editing programs at all and the whole Instagram craze left me unimpressed as well.

Vintager is a new free program for Windows that can be best described as an image editing Instagram hybrid.

It ships with several presets and effects that you can apply to images and offers basic image editing options such as rotating, cropping or changing the size of images.