Digital Payag

This guide is almost similar to my previous article about using your camera for this function. However, the beauty of this guide is that we are going to use one of Windows Powertools called Timershot. It is a free lightweight program that works perfectly right for this guide.

Things to remember

Software required: Windows Timershot
System requirements: Windows XP on a basic desktop PC
Installation difficulty: Easy
Optional requirements: Apache server software and a broadband connection

Let’s now get started:

1. Run your Timershot exe to install
2. Open Timershot.exe
3. Look for active device (This is your usb camera)

4. Expand your settings

5. Adjust some Timershot settings

- Take pictures every – I suggest you set this to 3-5 seconds.
- Resize the picture – Set this to Large (1024 by 768) to have a clearer picture.
- Save In – Browse to your folder of choice. You can save this in your Apache’s folder, if you want to view your pictures on the internet. You need to have an “always online computer” to make this work.
- Check save a new copy of this file every time a picture is taken. This is to have a copy of each picture taken with the exact time and date displayed when you browse your pictures online.
- Click Apply Settings

6. Click Close Window to send the window to your taskbar.

That’s all you’re going to need to turn your ordinary pc camera into a surveillance camera. This is ideal for monitoring a home office or a small shop.

No matter how many ways you can find free mp3s online, I still prefer to use P2P because of how easy and fast it is to look for mp3s. For those of you who wants to have full control of what’s going on in the background of your Cabos software, follow me as I show you how to make a secure configuration for it. I’m going to use Cabos for this guide because It is free, light download and they say it is spyware-free. Yeah, it really looks like it is spyware-free because it doesn’t have ads.

Fire up your Cabos software, go to Edit and open Preferences

Under the Searching menu – An extra protection won’t hurt.

Check Ignore files that are adult content
Check Ignore files that are spam content

Under the Download menu – I prefer to move all of my files to my Desktop then transfer it later for me to monitor each file that I receive from the network.

Save downloaded files in your Desktop
Move completed music files to Desktop
Move completed picture files to Desktop
Move completed movie files to Desktop

Under the Sharing menu – If you are uber conscious with security, you should disable sharing to keep out lechers from connecting to your machine. But mind you, this will have a drastic effect on your download performance because for some reason you’ll appear selfish for not sharing your stuff. The network hates pure lechers and loves seeders. Which side are you in?

Uncheck Share partially downloaded files (Recommended)
Uncheck Share completely downloaded files (Recommended)
Share files in the following folders: Desktop
Maximum uploads per person: 1
Maximum uploads per person: 1

Network – If you disable the settings above, then might as well disable the following settings for added protection. Ohh, this will hurt your download efficiency real bad. Also connect to hosts that are English. Why? I don’t trust hosts coming from badass countries with badass reputation for hackers, viruses and the like (Turkish, Russian). Not necessarily but just weighting the odds. Again, this will limit your search results but who cares as long as you are secure right?

Preferentially connect to hosts that are - English
Uncheck Allow this computer to become an Ultrapeer
Uncheck Allow freeloaders to connect to this computer

Reminder: Please be considerate; buy the original stuff from the record bars. Not all artists specially the band groups are rich. They also fight poverty and want to live a good life.

A friend of mine complained to me that she couldn’t upload her pictures on my website because it exceeded the allowed file size. I told her to relax and taught her an old trick on how to compress her images without needing a special editing software. She didn’t thought this could be done so easily.

1. I told her to open her MS Paint
2. She opened her picture
3. then Saved it (Ctrl+S)

That’s all she did to compress her images. Adios!

We all know that most internet users have this top 10 websites they often visit everyday (or even more). This makes typing the entire URL too tasking and boring. However, by doing this tweak you can quickly access websites just by one click alone.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Open your Firefox browser
2. Go to Google.com
3. Key-in the name of the website
4. Point your mouse at the link of the site you’d like to bookmark
5. Hold the left-click of your mouse and drag it to your Firefox toolbar
6. Now you’ll see a button-like bookmark with the name of the website on your toolbar

7. Click your newly created button to launch the website

One user at Kalibog asks us if there is a way he could delete he’s files without being recovered again by any means. I said yes there is actually a feature bundled in CrapCleaner that allows him to do that. Why bother installing a separate software just for this purpose alone, when CrapCleaner has this feature already. For only around 400kb of download size, now you can have your own personal file shredder completely for FREE.

CrapCleaner’s Secure Deletion offers three levels of data shredding. From the basic form of secure deletion to the

Simple Overwrite (1 pass)

This is the most common form of secure deletion. Retrievable and unreliable.

DOD 5220.22-M (3 passes)

U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) standard for hard drive sanitization as specified in the 5220.22-M operating manual

NSA (7 passes)

This is for the paranoid user, developed by the National Security Agency of the United States of America for the purpose of deleting critical files.

Ok now let’s delete those pesky files.

1. Install and open CrapCleaner
2. Go to Options
3. Click the Settings Button
4. Under the secure deletion choose Secure file deletion (Slower)
5. Then select your preferred level of secure deletion

It is a common telltale amongst internet cafe users to avoid accessing e-commerce sites believing that they might expose personal data like credit card and email passwords. The fear of invasion of privacy and data theft is a reality most users face when stepping inside a public computer shop. This concern is a problem brought by cookies and auto saving of forms on most browsers that are insecure by default. Moreover, it is misconceived that just by using Firefox is enough to conclude that users are already SAFE without knowing that they are far from being safe not unless the safety settings are applied.

The question now is what are those safety settings we often fail to perceive?

The answers are just a few clicks away.

1. Open your Firefox browser
2. Under the Tools menu, go to Options…
3. Click the Privacy tab
4. Follow the instructions below

As you browse the web, Firefox keeps information about where you have been, what you have done etc. in the following areas.

History tab
Set to 0 days for Firefox to remember visited pages.

Saved Forms tab
Uncheck Save information, I enter in forms and the Search bars.

Passwords tab
Uncheck Remember Passwords

Download History tab
Set Firefox to remove files from the download manager when Firefox exits.

Cookies tab
Set Firefox to keep cookies until I close Firefox.

Then we use the Clear Private Data tool to clear all of the data left behind after using Firefox.

Click the Settings… button and select the following items to be cleared when closing Firefox.

Browsing History
Saved Form Information
Download History
Cookies
Cache
Authenticated Sessions
Check clear private data when closing Firefox.
Uncheck Ask me before clearing private data.
Click Ok to save your new settings

Just a quick tip for all of those Firefox lovers who just can’t get enough with this amazing browser.

Q: What version am I using?

A: On your browser’s address field Type in “about:” w/o quotes.

The browser will show you what Firefox version you are using along with the release url and some details.

Sometimes I find it stressful when I see lots of icons on my desktop. The more icons I have, the more I find it hard to figure out and find what I really need. An icon cluttered desktop also blocks my scenic wallpaper from being displayed well.

Enter Launchy

From the publisher’s site:

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

This light freeware made my desktop icon-free. Using customized hot keys I can open almost anything just by typing a keyword.

The latest version of Launchy can be downloaded from SourceForge.

This is a follow-up post to my first post about how to secure your mIRC client. Securing your IRC connection is important in order for you to stay anonymous.

One way of securing your IRC connection is by encryption using SSL.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), its successor, are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as e-mail, Internet faxing, and other data transfers. There are slight differences between SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0, but the protocol remains substantially the same. The term “SSL” as used here applies to both protocols unless clarified by context. Read more…

I stumbled upon this article from indymedia.org that shows you step-by-step set of instructions on how to easily secure your irc connection.

* Downloading the software (Windows) *

Go to http://www.stunnel.org/download/binaries.html

Download two files:
the latest stunnel file (will have a red asterisk beside it probably)
scroll down to the bottom of the page and download the file openssl.zip
Make a new directory (folder), maybe call it “working” or something
Copy the “stunnel-4.05.exe” into the “working” folder. The file may be called something a little different, like “stunnel-4.06.exe” if there have been updates since this was written.
Copy the openssl.zip file into the “working” folder
Unzip the openssl.zip file in the “working” folder. If you get a folder as a result, maybe called “openssl”, copy the files inside it back out into the “working” folder and delete the empty “openssl” folder. Read more…

Just an addition, not all IRC servers supports SSL. Ask a server admin or a channel operator if you can use SSL.

People tend to avoid the integrated relay chat (IRC) as a means of communication primarily because of two things. Most of the irc clients are not user friendly and they lack strong security against known security issues. It is a fact that IRC clients are susceptible to the wide spread of worms, viruses & trojans since the early days of the internet. However, things didn’t change since then, more and more computers had been victimized due to poor irc precautions being made. The least we can do to stay out of harms way is by properly configuring our irc client to withstand those destructive codes from infecting our computers.

For this guide i’m going to use the popular mIRC client.

Open miRC then go to Tools. Select Options... or press the shortcut key Alt+O.

Enable Flood Protection
Tick the Enable flood protection. The default settings should work on most users. (see the screenshot)

Disable DCC
I strong advise users to disable DCC if they intend to use mIRC for chatting purposes only.

On Send request:
Tick Ignore all

On Chat request:
Tick Ignore all

However, if you’d like to use the DCC feature, you should do the ff precautions.

1. You MUST not set the On Send request and On Chat request to Auto-get.

2. Set if file exists to Ask or if you can’t avoid to use the Auto-get file. However, you should at least assign nicknames of trusted chatters using the Trusted button.

3. Change the default DCC get folders (download folder) from the default path which is C:\Program Files\mIRC\download to C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Desktop. This way you can easiy monitor what files you are receiving.

4. Make sure you set the following file types to ignore. You can delete the specific file type if you are expecting a legit file from a friend or from someone you trust.

*.bat *.com *.dll *.exe *.htm *.html *.ini *.js *.lnk *.mrc *.pif *.pl *.scr *.shs *.vbs *.wmf

Set Lock for strong security:

1. Disable Send and Get
2. Disable all commands - Com, Decode, Dll, Run (You won’t be needing this if you are not running any mIRC scripts.)

Hereafter we can say that your mIRC is more secured. Enjoy chatting!