Archive for September, 2009
Create 360-degree 3D landscapes from your digital photos
Every so often, a genuinely new technology appears that astounds. Microsoft has launched a service at www.photosynth.com that’s designed to change the way you experience the places you photograph. By uploading a selection of photos you can use the free web service to transfer them into a 360-degree, three dimensional experience that you can click around and explore. The only downside is that it takes a little while to process your photos, so you’ll need a decent broadband connection.
A firewall for your hard drive
There’s no quicker way to infect your system than to tread online without the aid of a firewall. Unscrupulous saboteurs the world over are constantly on the hunt for unprotected PCs, and when they find them, it’s open season for unleashing keyloggers, dialers, Trojans, and other toxic trash the riff-raff carry in their arsenals. But with a firewall, you always know exactly what’s trying to access your PC, leaving you in command of who comes and goes.
YOU NEED TO OVERWRITE YOUR HAND DRIVE SEVEN TIMES WITH RANDOM DATA TO MAKE DATA UNRECOVERABLE
Conventional wisdom holds that you need to write and rewrite a hard drive numerous times with garbage before it will be totally unrecoverable by forensics experts. That’s not exactly the case: We overwrote a hard drive just once with zeroes and asked the recovery gurus at DriveSavers if they could rescue it. The answer: They couldn’t save a single bit. Now we don’t pretend to know about the hardcore resources of groups like the NSA, so if you’re that paranoid about being branded a terrorist because of a deleted PDF of The Anarchist’s Cookbook discovered on a used drive you bought on eBay, by all means, spend a week wiping that drive. But you’re just casually recycling a drive for resale or donation, a single pass will do the trick and will save you literally days of time waiting for the wipe to finish.
DO IT Run a program like KillDisk [www.killdisk.com] and select a single zeroes-only pass.
Learn about Windows Vista the alphabetical way
It’s taken a while – nearly a decade, in fact – but Games Workshop’s tiny figures finally have an MMO home. And this, a more competitive take on World of Warcraft, is a fine start. It’s a deep, complicated and occasionally beautiful game that both World of Warcraft fans, and the Games Workshop faithful, will fall head over heels in love with.
Is heuristic scanning the future of home PC security
Norton takes a different approach to next-gen security than both BufferZone and FocrField. Rather than employ virtualization technology to quarantine damaged imposed by malicious code, AntiBot looks to prevent contaminants from ever having a chance to cause a ruckus-virtual or otherwise-by catching them before they’re able to load. It does this through heuristic scanning: analyzing the behavior of every running process and program, looking for characteristics most commonly associated with malware. Like the developers, Norton doesn’t bill AntiBot as a stand-alone security application but instead recommends running it alongside your existing anti-malware suite. Nevertheless, we threw AntiBot into the infested online jungle to see if it-and our system-could emerge unscathed.
Protects you from threats on the web, but not from yourself
Just surfing the Internet can be enough to infect your system and grant malware uninvited access to your hard drive. But what about the malware that is invited? Malware writers know that the quickest way to infiltrate a system is through the end user, and there’s no shortage of dirty code masquerading under the guise of helpful applications. By the time you realize you’ve been duped, it’s too late, and it’s here that ForceField ultimately falls short.
SUPERFETCH BOOSTS PERFORMANCE
Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed to more intelligently load applications into RAM based on frequency of use. With Superfetch on, your PC should theoretically get faster over time, particularly when loading frequently apps. You won’t see improvement in general performance, like rendering Photoshop files, but Superfetch does tend to make apps load10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.
The quality of Canon’s inkjets has never been in question, with its top-end products, such as the ipF5000, offering close to printing nirvana. It’s consumer inkjets have been just as reliable, and the quality of its PIXMA range, while far from perfect , is a huge hit with home users.
Video editors and motion-graphics artists have been poorly served by laptops, with even the most expensive notebook components proving inadequate for heavy renders or editing. Canadian manufacturer Eurocom has a cunning solution: shoehorn desktop components into a laptop chasis. The results is the beefy D900C Phantom-X, with a desktop processor and the option ( as tested) of dual SLI graphic cards.
