Optting Out of Behavioral Advertising

Are you concerned about your privacy in relationship to Internet advertising? The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) offers a tool that allows you "opt out of behavioral advertising" that is utilized by its members.

This is not all an encompassing tool, there are a lot of caveats, but it does offer some control over your online privacy. It doesn't allow you to opt out of web advertising, it only allows you to "opt out" of the behavioral advertising delivered by its member companies.

Behavioral advertising is used to precisely target Internet advertising at you based on your surfing habits. These companies track you by placing their ads on web sites and using their cookies to track where you're surfing.

To opt out of an NAI member's behavioral advertising program, go to the tool,  check the box that corresponds to the company (or press the button labeled "Select All"), then press the the "Submit" button. The Tool will replace the specified advertising cookie(s) and show your opt-out status.

More information:

• Network Advertising Initiative

Article: Five Best Tax Preparation Tools

LifeHacker reports: "It's tax time, and here in the United States you're guaranteed a faster refund if you're due one by filing your taxes electronically. The trouble is that there are dozens of tools that can help you e-file. Some of them help you maximize your deductions and make sure nothing's overlooks, and others just make the filing process quick and easy. Here are five of the best tax preparation tools, based on your nominations." (read the rest of the article)

Software: Free BarCode Generator

The Bytescout BarCode Generator is a free program that is able to create and export barcodes into several different image formats (e.g. EMF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF).  The application supports several different 1D and 2D barcode types (e.g. Codabar, Code 39, Interleaved 2 of 5, Code 93, Code 128, EAN-13, EAN-8, JAN-13, Bookland, UPC-A, UPC-E, Postnet, PDF417, Truncated PDF417, DataMatrix, QR Code and others)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: MS Windows 95/NT/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7/x64, Microsoft NET 2.00 or higher installed

Windows 7: Backing up EFS certificates

Do you use the Encrypted File System (EFS) that's built into Windows 7 (which is included in Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of the OS) to protect your data on your local hard drive?  If so you should make sure that you back up the EFS certificate so you can recover your encrypted data if the stored keys on your hard drive get accidentally corrupted or deleted.


To backup the EFS key, use the following procedure:

• From the Start menu in the Search field, type CERTMGR.MSC, then press the ENTER key to open the Certificate Manager.
• Expand the Personal node, and click Certificates.
• Scroll down to find the certificate that shows "Encrypting File System" in the Intended Purposes column, and click it.
• Click Actions > All Tasks > Export...
• On the first page of the Export Wizard, press the Next button.
• Click Yes, export the private key and press the Next button.
• Click Personal Information Exchange and press the Next button.
• Create a password to encrypt the private key file, then press the Next button.
• Enter a file name and location (or press the Browse button to navigate the local drives) to store the certificate.
• Press the Finish button.

Notes: In the Certificate Manager if there is more than one EFS certificate make sure to back them all up on some type of removable media (such as a USB key or external hard drive). Then store that device in a safe physical location.

Article: AWS offers free Windows on EC2 (kind of)

GIGAOM reports: "Amazon will let customers run free micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog.

Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform by letting them test new or existing applications in its cloud for free. While Amazon offers a choice of operating systems, Microsoft licensing constraints have made running Windows workloads on AWS more expensive than running them on Linux." (read the rest of the article)

If you want to learn more about AWS and EC2, this might be a great opportunity to get started without costing you any money.

Article: Microsoft revives flight sim by giving it away free

The Register reports: "Microsoft has said that it will be reviving its Flight Simulator franchise this spring with a free version of the game entitled simply Flight.

Redmond is making the game available in a private beta at present, but plans to release it as a free download eventually. The game needs a minimum of 10GB of hard drive space, a dual-core 2Ghz processor, Windows XP SP3 and 2GB of RAM, according to the video trailer. Initially Flight will only have one plane – the ICON A5 flying boat - but Windows Live users will get access to extra missions and plane types if they sign in." (read the rest of the article)

ShapeCatcher.com (Unicode Character Finder)

ShapeCatcher.com helps you to find the right Unicode characters.  All you have to do is draw the Unicode character you're looking for, and the site will show you the closest matches in their database. Currently, there are 10877 Unicode character glyphs in their database.

Note: The site currently doesn't support Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters.

If you don't know what Unicode is, per Wikipedia it's "a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. " (read the rest of the article)

Play Cut the Rope for the your Browser

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab to port their popular game Cut the Rope in to  HTML5 to demonstrate its robustness as a development platform. The game was  primarily designed to demonstrate Internet Explorer 9 capabilities, but it works in other browsers (like Chrome).

Emperor 1510 Workstation from MWE Lab at CES 2011

At CES 2012 MWE Lab introduced the Emperor 1510, which is the ultimate computer workstation chair for around $6000 USD.

Check out the site for more information.

Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions

If you have a newer SSD drive you have to make sure that the partition alignment is setup correctly. Otherwise, you might be sacrificing some of your performance.

LifeHacker did a great article called "Speed Up Your SSD By Correctly Aligning Your Partitions", here is an excerpt: "To see if your partitions are aligned correctly, hit the Start menu and type in msinfo32. Enter Msinfo32 and go to Components > Storage > Disks. Look for your SSD on the list and find the "Partition Starting Offset" item. If this number is divisible by 4096 (that is, if dividing it by 4096 equals a whole number and not a decimal), your partition is correctly aligned. If not, you need to realign it. " (read the rest of the article here)

Privacy: Introduction to Publicly Available Information

As the Internet grew over the last few decades, people and companies would make information publicly available without realizing how it can be exploited if used improperly.

Criminals have learned how to take advantage of this information by having computers crawl the public web looking for it.  For example, they first started looking for email addressees for sending SPAM, and later evolved into searching for other types of data.

Have you ever wondered how much can someone find out about you on the Internet?  There is an amazing amount of public information available about most people that they might not realize is there.

Below is a brief description of some of the more popular examples:

• Do a web search on your whole name or email address and see what you pull up. 
• There are companies that compile public databases into a central location, and sell that data.  This information is public (e.g. from tax records, DMV, etc.), so in most cases you can't request that you're information be removed.
• There is also information that we publicly post through social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.), that you might be making publicly available without realizing it.  
• Go to a site called IPFINGERPRINTS, it will show the geographical location of where it knows IP address is located.  Companies regular use the IP address information to track the location of where visitors are located.  This information is generally used to more accurately target advertising for products and services.
• Note: Depending on the service provider you're using, the location information may vary.

If you're wondering what you can do to protect yourself:

• Without the right privacy settings on your personal and friend's accounts on any of the social networking sites, any information that is posted will be indexed and made publicly available.  Most of these sites use "public" as their default privacy settings, which means anyone can view it including the search engines.  If you don't want your data to be publicly available, learn to lock-down your privacy settings.
• If you find information on a web site that is posted about you, you can contact the web site and ask them to remove it.  You do need to understand that in most cases there is nothing to force any company to remove information (this can vary depending on local or country laws).
• Use common sense, it doesn't matter how good your privacy settings are, don't post information on any site, including social networking sites that you don't want other people being able to find out about yourself.
• In general it's a good idea to lock down all your online accounts with strong and unique passwords.  Criminals have recently been targeting people's email and social networking accounts to target their friends, family and business associates with different types of scams.  For example, they pretend to be you and tell everyone you know that you're stuck in a foreign country and you need their help by sending money.

Software: Open Freely (Open Almost Anything)

Do you have a file that you can't open because its in a format that you don't have a program for? Check out a free program called Open Freely that allows you to view over 100 different file formats (e.g. Microsoft Office, media [graphics and movies], compressed files, and more). Open Freely's installation includes the free K-Lite Codec Pack, which contains dozens of CODECs for opening media files and other formats.

Web Sites: Top 10 Under-Hyped Web Apps, 2011 Edition

Excerpt from lifehacker.com: "We all discover new web apps each year but not every one of them gets the recognition it deserves. With 2011 drawing to a close, we wanted to highlight the 10 we felt deserved a bit more hype." (read the rest of the article)

IMHO: Some of these web applications are really cool and worth checking out.

Software: Windows Defender Offline (beta)

Microsoft has publicly released a beta of its Windows Defender offline tool (32-bit and 64-bit versions are available).  This tool allows for the creation of  bootable CDs, DVDs or USB drives that allows you to run Windows Defender. The application is designed to detect and remove bootkit and rootkit malware that can infect the Windows boot process. (Get more information and download the tool)

Software: Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition is a Windows XP/Vista/7 disk imaging/cloning backup solution that is free for personal use.  Some of the features of the software include:

• Access images in Windows Explorer
• Schedule backups
• Linux Rescue CD
• Windows PE 3 Rescue Media (RAID support)

Obviously, the paid version of the software offers more features, see the following chart for a comparison.

Web Site: Free Online File Conversion

Do you need to convert a file (e.g. picture, video, music, eBook, archive, document etc.) into a different format?  There is a site called Online-Convert that provides a fast easy way to convert several different file formats, without installing extra software.

Software: Picasa 3.9 now available

Its been awhile since Google has updated Picasa, their free photo-editing application. They added sharing directly to Google+, new photo editing effects, and more.

Below is a list of some of the updated features:

• Added ability to upload to Google+: share with circles.
• Social Tagging with Google+.
• New photo editing effects.
• Side by side editing.
• Updated RAW support for newer cameras.
• Improvements to Face Movie maker.
• Improved restoring of virtual albums.

Download Picasa 3.9

Software: Password Management Applications

Do you have several passwords, and you're having a hard time remembering all of them.  Writing them down on a piece of paper is not secure. You could created encrypted document of some type (e.g. text, Word, Excel, etc.) to store them.  There are also several password management applications available for you to download, some are free and others cost money.

Although before you pay for anything or try other programs.  Check out a program called KeePass.  This is a multiple platform, open-source password management application.  There are also 3rd party ports of the application that work on the popular mobile platforms (e.g. iPhone, Android, etc.).

KeyPass will store your passwords in an encrypted file, so even if someone steals it they can't read it unless they know your password.  Check out the web site for more information.

If you want something that offers more features then KeyPass, checkout some commercial password management applications like:

• 1Password
• LastPass

 

Easy Application Installation and Removal

If you just build a new PC, it can be a pain going around the web to re-install all your favorite applications.  If you have an existing PC, and are looking for an easier way to find, download, updated, or uninstall applications.

Below are some tools that can help you with these tasks:

• Allmyapps - An application store for Windows.
• Download the client to your computer, and find new applications and keep them up-to-date.
• Revo Uninstaller - Helps completely uninstall applications.
• A freeware and professional version are available.
• PC Decrapifier - Removes pre-installed software on many new PCs from hardware manufactures.

Windows 7: Manage User Stored Credentials (User Names and Passwords)

When your computer tries to connect to other devices on your local network that requires a username and password.  Windows will attempt to use the currently logged on user credentials to authenticate that connection. If that username and password doesn't work, it will attempt to find one in the stored credentials. If these credentials are not available on the local system, you will be prompted with a username and password dialog box with a check box titled Remember My Password.

If you checked the Remember My Password check box, the information will be saved to the stored credentials area of your user profile. Then, when you connect to the same resource at a future date, Windows will be able to use these credentials to automatically authenticate your connection.

If you wish to view or change any of the user information in the stored credentials, you can do so by accessing the Stored User Names and Passwords tool.

• Open the Run dialog, press the WinKey+R.
• Type "rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr" and press the Enter button.  

Once the dialog is displayed you can change or delete any of the stored credential information.