One of Firefox's most popular features is its add-on support, with its accompanying deep add-on catalog. The new Firefox 4 Mobile for Android (download) and for Maemo devices (download) also support add-ons, so we've got a collection of Firefox mobile add-on essentials for you that covers the bases, from useful ad blocking to interesting, mobile-specific password helpers.
The best-known add-on that's a must-have is Adblock Plus (download), ported by the developer from Firefox desktop to mobile. If you're not familiar with it, it blocks ads by using blacklists to filter out the ads. Once installed, the … Read more
I'm a bit of a Craigslist junkie. I've used it to buy everything from a piano to a loft bed to a go-kart, and to sell or give away a host of unwanted items.
But despite its spartan interface--or perhaps because of it--the service isn't particularly user-friendly. For one thing, it doesn't let me save individual listings. And adding photos to my own listing means copying them over from my camera, resizing them, and on and on. Hassle city.
Hello, world! Today it's your Backup Day. World Backup Day is a new idea promoted by a small team of Redditors, and it's a good idea. You can never be too careful when it comes to backing up.
By the way, this is about your data, and not calling your buddies over for help in a hostile situation, which is not really my area of expertise. So let's talk backups!
Basically it means putting your data in multiple places so that if something happens to one place (let's say you forget your laptop on the top of your car and subsequently back over it), that important PowerPoint presentation you've been working on isn't lost.
Backing up is much easier than you might think. For example, if you've been working on an important essay, you can just e-mail it once in a while to your mom or to yourself. Just make sure you use an online free e-mail service, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or all of them. This goes for photos as well. If you remember to e-mail them to your mom when you have new ones (and she'll probably appreciate that very much), chances are she'll save them for you on her computer, and even if not, they are still in the Sent Items folder of your online e-mail account in case you have lost the originals.
Obviously, e-mailing can only handle a relatively small amount of data and you'll have to remember to do that manually. If you have many files that need backing up, you'll want something more robust. This is when a backup plan is necessary.
Online backup Similar to e-mailing, an online backup plan provides you with a certain amount of storage space that you can access over the Internet, aka "the cloud." And no, your data is not flying in the sky, it's stored and managed on one or multiple servers located in different parts of the world. There are many online backup services, such as Amazon S3, McAfee, Mozy, or even Comcast. … Read more
Before you purchase e-books from vendors like Amazon or from the iBookstore, see what your local library has to offer. With a library card and a free application, Overdrive Media Console, you can download free e-books and audiobooks to your iPhone (and any other iOS device), BlackBerry, Android device, or computer.
Remember, though, that most libraries might only carry a few copies of each title, so be ready to wait your turn. Additionally, most books have a loaning period of 7 to 14 days, so there's no room for procrastinating here.
Editors' note, 10:44 a.m. PT on March 31: Samsung has been cleared of the keylogger allegations. Read the details in CNET's follow-up story.
A security researcher revealed today that he had purchased two new laptops from Samsung, and discovered both of them to be infected with the StarLogger (download) keystroke-recording program. While there's very little that can be done about keystrokes already recorded, checking your own laptop for such software is actually quite simple--if you're familiar with mucking about in your system directories and Registry.
Note that the researcher only reported StarLogger on two models, a Samsung R525 and a Samsung R540--and that Samsung subsequently said that he was mistaken. CNET examined another new Samsung laptop, the Samsung Series 9, and did not find a keylogger installed.
Because it's a keylogger, most often used for spying on employees and children, StarLogger cannot be accessed from your Start menu. (Or at least, it shouldn't be accessible there. If it is, whoever installed it did a poor job.)
The easiest way to find StarLogger is to look for its Registry key, which is used to load it when Windows is started. To see if this has occurred, open a command prompt and type "Run Regedit". Then go to the Menu bar, select Edit and then Find. You want to search for "winsl", without the quotes. If it's installed, you should see a Registry key that looks like this:
You can also look for the following files on your hard drive, although keyloggers are designed to hide themselves. Open Windows Explorer, and then hit the Alt key to bring up the Menu bar. Go to Tools, Folder Options, and View. Under Advanced Settings, you'll see an option for Hidden Files and Folders. Make sure that Show is checked.
If you have StarLogger, its files will be located in your Windows root directory, in a subdirectory labeled "SL". A list of files you can expect to see is below: … Read more
Google recently updated its algorithm to take down Web sites that use SEO to game search results and up their ranking, but spam still dominates results. Search for something like "how to lose weight" and a flurry of content farms will appear.
Content farms simply hire low-paid freelancers to write articles about every topic in existence, allowing their Web sites to rank high in Google search results. The result? Unqualified, haphazardly written posts that can bury more reputable sources and delay the time it takes to get the answers you're looking for.
In response to these content farms, you can now permanently block Web sites from search results. Make use of this tip (in the video below)--Google is likely noting users' blocks to identify Web sites it should manually lower the ranking of.
If any single feature in the new Firefox 4 could be described as "killer," it's Firefox Sync. Originally launched as a buggy add-on called Mozilla Weave several years ago, it now comes baked directly into Firefox and with all its creases ironed out. It will synchronize your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs across not only multiple computers, but your Android and Maemo phones and tablets, too.
Check out the procedure for linking up Firefox on all your digital toys in this How To video, and if you have any questions about Sync, let me know in … Read more
Ads that track your online behavior using cookies aren't the worst problem on the Internet, but they are one of the more annoying ones. Internet Explorer 9 offers a tracking ad blocker similar to Firefox's AdBlock Plus add-on, except this one's built in.
In this video, we show you how to enable the list, how to tweak it to your liking, and how to download extra lists to customize it even further.
Taking a page from its competitors but putting its own spin on it, Microsoft has introduced a new way to search in Internet Explorer 9. Called One Box, it combines the search box with the location bar.
You can navigate to a site, search for sites, look at browsing history or favorites, and change search providers on the fly. Check out how to use the One Box in this how-to video. You can also download Internet Explorer 9 here.
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