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CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these …

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is a full-blown anti-malware program that has recently left the labs and can be considered the next step in the detection and removal of malware. Malwarebytes Team put together a host of new technologies that were specially designed to quickly detect, deter and destroy any malware that could reside in your computer. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware monitors every process and actually stops malicious processes before they even start. It uses an impressive technology that is in fact a completely novel way of heuristic scanning and it is the teams response to the increasingly complex malware threats. And, as they did with Malwarebytes' RogueRemover we al…

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component, written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program. Notepad++ supports the following languages: C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, javascript, RC resource file, makefile, ASCII art file, doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS source files, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python and Lua. Download: Notepad++ 6.7.7 Homepage: Notepad++ View the full article

Surprise! Did you think Google's Wireless service was going to take a while to get here? According to The Wall Street Journal, the service could launch as early as tomorrow, Wednesday, April 22. Google has publicly talked about plans to launch an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) wireless service in March and said the service would see the light of day in "the next few months." "Google Wireless" (not necessarily the official name) will resell network access to Sprint and T-Mobile, but with a few twists. The Journal says the system will seamlessly switch between T-Mobile, Sprint, and Wi-Fi (including for calls), depending on what is available, and that—get this—custom…

Google is cracking down on ad-injecting extensions for its Chrome browser after finding that almost 200 of them exposed millions of users to deceptive practices or malicious software. More than a third of Chrome extensions that inject ads were recently classified as malware in a study that Google researchers carried out with colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. The Researchers uncovered 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users. Google officials have since killed those extensions and incorporated new techniques to catch any new or updated extensions that carry out similar abuses. View the full article

The use of ad-blocking software is growing as Internet users try to deal with the swelling number of ads delivered programmatically and the pervasive tracking of their online behavior. This growth has set alarm bells ringing within the online advertising industry, with concerns that the use of ad blockers could damage publishers' online revenues. Just last week it emerged that two groups of publishers in France are considering a lawsuit against, Eyeo GmbH, the maker of AdBlockPlus. While behavioral advertising ideally makes advertising more relevant to viewers, some people find it "creepy"; data shows that last year's revelations of the National Security Administration's…

If you don't have your Windows 7 disc handy—but want to create a custom installation, run Windows from a USB drive, or just do a fresh install—you'll need an ISO file of the disc. You used to be able to download them from Digital River's servers, but those links no longer work. Now, Microsoft has a Software Recovery Center where you can download those ISOs for free. This isn't piracy, of course—you still need a valid Windows license to download the ISO and register Windows. If you purchased a retail version of Windows, enter the product key from the package. If you can't find it, use a program like Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder. Once Microsoft confirms your produ…

While Microsoft has dropped hints that the Internet Explorer brand is going away, the software maker has now confirmed that it will use a new name for its upcoming browser successor, codenamed Project Spartan. Speaking at Microsoft Convergence yesterday, Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Capossela revealed that the company is currently working on a new name and brand. "We’re right now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," said Capossela. "We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing." Internet E…

Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users this summer, but Microsoft is also extending its offer to software pirates. "We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10," says Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s Windows chief, in an interview with Reuters. The move means that thousands, perhaps millions, of machines will get a free copy of Windows 10 even if a license has not been properly acquired. "Anyone with a qualified device can upgrade to Windows 10, including those with pirated copies of Windows," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We believe customers over time will realize the value of properly…

If you recently installed or updated uTorrent on your PC, you may have have picked up an unwanted passenger: a bitcoin miner called Epic Scale. If you don't pay attention, that piece of code can be inadvertently installed with the latest uTorrent build (version 3.4.2). It can then use your computer as part of a bitcoin farm (Litecoin, to be exact) to generate revenue for third parties. Users first reported the situation on uTorrent's forums, and it was quickly confirmed by a senior support manager. He said that the app "cannot be installed without permission," but one user claimed that there was "never a warning about it," even though he opted out of other bundled softwar…

Lenovo bagged a paltry US$250,000 from the deal that saw it install the Superfish certificate slurper onto PCs, according to reports. The PC maker was last month caught installing the ad/bloat/malware into its consumer PCs, sparking a very considerable backlash once the software's ability to intercept encrypted website communications was revealed. Forbes sources' now say Lenovo made between US$200,000 to US$250,000 from the deal to pre-install Superfish, a paltry amount given its net profit was US$253 million in the three months to December. At $250,000 the return on investment for Superfish is abominable: Lenovo initially defended the installation as a helpful t…

CAPTCHAs are an unfortunate side effect of the internet. They're those irritating collection of numbers and letters morphed into some Surrealist dreck that leaves us guessing, and guessing, and guessing. Google wants to improve all of that with updates to reCAPTCHA, a one-click solution for telling websites that you are, in fact, a human being. Wouldn't abandoning those Dali-like distortions defeat the purpose of protecting websites from bots? Not really, Google says, because the old CAPTCHA system wasn't working that great anyways: While the new reCAPTCHA API may sound simple, there is a high degree of sophistication behind that modest checkbox. CAPTCHAs have lon…

There has been a LOT of confusion around Windows, SSDs (hard drives), and whether or not they are getting automatically defragmented by automatic maintenance tasks in Windows. There's a general rule of thumb or statement that "defragging an SSD is always a bad idea." I think we can agree we've all heard this before. We've all been told that SSDs don't last forever and when they die, they just poof and die. SSDs can only handle a finite number of writes before things start going bad. This is of course true of regular spinning rust hard drives, but the conventional wisdom around SSDs is to avoid writes that are perceived as unnecessary. I've seen statements aro…

Seeing a threat to their ecosystem, French publishers follow their German colleagues and prepare to sue startup Eyeo GmbH, the creator of anti-advertising software AdBlock Plus. But they cannot ignore that, by using ABP, millions of users actively protest against the worst forms of advertising. On grounds that it represents a major economic threat to their business, two groups of French publishers are considering a lawsuit against AdBlockPlus creator Eyeo GmbH.(Les Echos, broke the news in this story, in French). Plaintiffs are said to be the GESTE and the French Internet Advertising Bureau. The first is known for its aggressive stance against Google via its cont…

Microsoft first started supporting the MKV file format natively on the company’s Xbox One console earlier this year, and now the company is bringing those changes to Windows. Starting today, Windows 8.1 will now natively support the Matroska Multimedia Container (MKV) file format with the built-in video app. The open standard container format has long been used to provide pirated copies of movies and TV shows through BitTorrent or other file sharing sites, but Microsoft’s move to provide native support lends the file format some much-needed legitimacy. > While it’s likely most content providers will continue to provide streaming video instead of DRM-free down…

Since 2004, Google has been paying Mozilla a ton of money each year—estimated at around $100 million—for the privilege of being the default search engine used in the Firefox browser. This contribution represented the lion's share of Mozilla's income, something in the ballpark of 85 percent. That deal, last renewed for a three-year period in 2011, has come to an end, and this time it won't be renewed. Mozilla announced today that the free browser vendor is switching to a range of different search providers. In the US, Firefox will now default to using Yahoo (which continues to be powered by Microsoft's Bing engine); in Russia it will use Yandex, and in China, Baidu…

At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced. I did a blog post back in January, called “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?†It covered the reliability of each of the drive models that we use. This month I’m updating those numbers and sharing some surprising new findings. Reliability of Hard Drive Brands Losing a disk drive at Backblaze is not a big deal. Every file we back up is replicated across multiple drives in the data center. When a drive fails, it is promptly replaced, and its data is restored. Even so, we still t…

Authorities are advising all users of the Tor network to check their computers for malware after it emerged that a Russian hacker has been using the network to spread a powerful virus. Tor, which began as a secret project from the US Naval Research Laboratory, works by piling up layers of encryption over data, nested like the layers of an onion, which gave the network its original name, The Onion Router (TOR). Tor encrypts data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit made up of successive, randomly selected relays. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit. View the f…

foobar2000 is a comprehensive, easy to use audio player for Windows. Featuring full Unicode support, advanced tagging capabilities, customizable hotkeys, ReplayGain to help correct your audio and many more useful utilities to assist your media library. There are multiple ways to configure and customize your user interface. foobar's developer also includes an open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player. foobar2000 allows you to easily use multiple playlists and utilize features to remove both duplicates and dead items. foobar handles multiple popular audio formats, including: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis…

Just a quick note (I have the flu, can barely focus) to say Mozilla has finally set a target date for a Win x64 release - the end of March, 2015. Read about it here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2876519

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen one-upped his good friend co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates with an even bigger donation to fight the Zaire Ebolavirus (ZEBOV) which has engulfed a trio of nations in western Africa in a deadly, fast-growing epidemic. Gates and his wife have pledged to give away all their money to charity before they die. His Microsoft-derived fortune current makes him the world's second richest man with a net worth of $81.4B USD. In September he announced that he would be giving $50M USD to fight Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The announcement prompted Gates' close friend and protege, Facebook, Inc. (FB) CEO and founder Ma…

Eager to infuse the Web with the communications interactivity of mobile apps, Mozilla on Thursday announced a video chat service called Hello. The technology, built into the beta version of Firefox, lets people set up free video or audio calls with others using Firefox. Mozilla will gradually enable the feature in coming weeks. There was a day when video chat was hard to do. Skype arrived just as Internet connectivity and video compression technology made it more feasible. Video calls once were a fixture for world's fair predictions of a sci-fi future. Now it's downright commonplace. So what sets Firefox Hello apart? It's busting loose from the silos that can …

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface. Some of the useful features include drag and drop support, filename filters, network configuration wizard, powerful site manager, transfer queue, and it even supports resume and transfer of files larger than 4GB. When FileZilla v3 was released a built in updater was introduced. This allowed users to update their FileZilla Client faster and easier. Included are options to check for nightly and beta builds of the FileZilla Client. Download: FileZilla 3.9.0.6 | View All Homepage: FileZil…

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is a full-blown anti-malware program that has recently left the labs and can be considered the next step in the detection and removal of malware. Malwarebytes Team put together a host of new technologies that were specially designed to quickly detect, deter and destroy any malware that could reside in your computer. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware monitors every process and actually stops malicious processes before they even start. It uses an impressive technology that is in fact a completely novel way of heuristic scanning and it is the teams response to the increasingly complex malware threats. And, as they did with Malwarebytes' RogueRemover w…

CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these …