Never Leave Your USB Drive Behind Again With USB Alert

Everyone knows the horror of looking for it when you need it only to realize that you left it behind plugged into the last computer you used.
With USB Alert, you'll get a warning when you shut down to unplug your USB drive before you go.

USB Alert will play a warning sound and display an on-screen alert every time you issue a shutdown or lock command warning you that you have a USB storage device still connected to the system. From there you can see your connected devices or dismiss the alert – but the warning makes all the difference.

Download USB Alert


How do you make sure you don't leave your drives behind when it's time to leave the office for the day?
Leave your tips in the comments.

How To Merge Avi Movies With VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a software with the ability to merge avi files.
You can also use this tutorial for other purposes, for instance to merge episodes of a TV series, or multiple videos that you have shot with your camcorder, digital camera or smartphone. Everything is possible as long as the input format of the videos is avi.

First download the latest version of VirtualDub from the official website. Unpack the portable software to your hard drive after download, and run the VirtualDub.exe afterwards.

You load the first movie with a click on File --> Open Video File. Click on File again and select Append Avi Segment for each additional part that you have as a file on your hard drive.

You can only load one movie at a time, which makes the process somewhat unhandy if you have many different parts.

Switch to the Video menu and make sure Full Processing Mode is selected there. Click on Compression under Video afterwards, and select one of the available video codecs. Please note that you need suitable codecs installed on your system for a solid result that offers a good image quality and suitable file size.

You can furthermore add filters to the process, for instance if you would like to resize the video, change the brightness and contrast or add a logo to one of the corners. You can preview the changes by pressing enter or by selecting File > Preview Filtered.
Once you have made your selection select File > Save as Avi and pick a directory on the local hard drive to save the video to.

 VirtualDub will display a status window where you can get information about the current processing status, as well as an estimation of the file size of the new video file. You can jack up the process priority if your computer is idle otherwise.
And that’s it. Just wait for the process to finish. It is recommended to play the video once on your hard drive to make sure that the merging was successful and without errors like out of sync audio.

Malware Steals Your Bitcoin

Bitcoins have become popular as an alternative to government-controlled currencies, but a new Trojan seems to be specifically targeting Bitcoin wallets in an attempt to steal funds, security firm Symantec warns.

The malware, Infostealer.Coinbit, is fairly simple: It targets Windows machines and zeros in on the standard file location for a Bitcoin wallet. It then e-mails the wallet — a data file containing private crypto keys — to the attacker by way of a server in Poland, according to Symantec, which was first to alert on the attack.

“If you use Bitcoins, you have the option to encrypt your wallet and we recommend that you choose a strong password for this in the event that an attacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open,” Symantec’s Stephen Doherty wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Current exchange rates place the value of one Bitcoin to about $23.50 USD as of late Friday afternoon, according to bitcoincharts.com. For an overview of how the system works, see the currency's official site.

Earlier this week, a hack on a Bitcoin user's Windows computer was said to have resulted in the loss of the equivalent of $500,000 USD. While the amount is said to be disputed -- such a large amount transferring would have caused a drop in the value of the Bitcoin, and some claim the system wouldn't have been able to handle such a large transfer.

Regardless of the claims validity, it is believed that hackers have been able to develop botnets to exploit the Bitcoin system, Symantec reported earlier this week. It is believed that based on current valuations, these efforts could be netting these botnet owners the equivalent of $100,000 per month.

Related articles

• There's a Virus that Will Steal all Your Bitcoins [Bitcoin] (gizmodo.com)
• New Bitcoin malware steals Bitcoin wallets: Infostealer.Coinbit (zdnet.com)
• Trojan Goes After Bitcoins (it.slashdot.org)

German Hacker Gets Therapy After Hacking Lady Gaga

An 18-year-old who hacked the computers of pop stars including Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake has been ordered to undergo therapy to break his hacking addiction. He must also carry out six months of community service.

The teen had confessed to planting Trojan horse malware on stars' computers to gain access to their personal information and unreleased singles and compromising photos.

The judge ruled that the teen was driven more by a desire for recognition than by criminal intent, which contributed to his receiving a lighter sentence.

Related articles

• Hacker wrists slapped for stealing Lady Gaga songs (go.theregister.com)
• German Men Sentenced for Hacking Lady Gaga, Dr. Dre (pcworld.com)

LulzSec Releases Over 62.000 Hacked Passwords

Hacker group LulzSec published the accounts of over 62,000 emails and passwords for free for download.

Mikko H. Hypponen from F-secure believes that the emails and passwords were from a database kept by website Writerspace.com, according to the Hacker News.

Gizmodo took the database and has made a script for users to input their email address to check it against the release from LulzSec. Unless you were a member of Writerspace, you're probably not affected, but this is a good way to confirm.

Related articles

• LulzSec Hack Exposes 62,000+ Passwords: How to See If Yours Is Out There (techland.time.com)
• LulzSec Leaks 62,000 Passwords, Usernames For Unknown Sites (fastcompany.com)
• LulzSec Releases 62,000 Email Addresses and Passwords (linearfix.wordpress.com)

Citigroup Hack Hit 360,000 Credit Cards

Citigroup's said that about one percent of customers had been affected, implying that around 200,000 had been affected.

Citigroup released a letter to its customers implying that around 360,083 card accounts had been affected.

Citigroup now says it's replaced the cards of about 217,000 customers.

It seems California was the hardest-hit state, with about 80,000 affected accounts.

Citigroup has reiterated that the information taken won't allow hackers to access funds directly.

Related articles

• Citigroup Says 360,000 Credit Cards Were Hacked (techland.time.com)
• Citigroup Hack Was "Easy" and More Hacks Are Expected (inquisitr.com)
• Citigroup Says Hacking Affected 360,000 Cards (online.wsj.com)
• Citigroup 'hack' was simple enough for a child to exploit (theinformativereport.com)
• Citigroup Reveals Breach Affected Over 360,000 Cards (pcworld.com)

The Spaceship Office of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs presented plans for an office building that is completely circular in shape.

Jobs himself characterized the building concept as looking a bit like a spaceship.

The building will be quite expensive to make due to its lack of flat surfaces.

The outside windows will require large sheets of curved glass, which aren't even common at Apple Stores.

Related articles

• Steve Jobs: "One more thing, we are building a spaceship." (thenextweb.com)
• Steve Jobs's Sweet Talk: In a presentation to the Cupertino... (curbed.com)
• Steve Jobs Pitches Spaceship-Shaped Office Building to Cupertino City Council (shoppingblog.com)

iOS 5 Jailbroken

iOS 5 just came out yesterday and only to developers but that did not stop super jailbreak MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team from successfully jailbraking it.


The jailbreak proof comes via MuscleNerd on Twitter who posted two images of an iPod touch 4G running a jailbroken version of the new iOS.

The first shows the Cydia store installed, the second shows root access has been gained.
MuscleNerd forms part of the iPhone Dev Team who are well-known for performing jailbreaks on Apple’s iOS versions. T

his latest jailbreak required the use of Geohot’s Limera1n exploit and unfortunately is tethered, meaning each reboot of your device requires connection to a PC in order to retain the jailbroken state.

The good news is that this method will work on the final version of iOS, so you can jailbreak the day iOS 5 is released this Fall.
Thanks to the work of lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iPhone jailbreaking is exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The same statute has been invoked in several high-stakes jailbreaking lawsuits involving Sony's PlayStation game console, which enjoys no such exemption.

Related articles

• iOS 5 Jailbroken Already (techie-buzz.com)
• iOS 5 jailbroken early by iPhone developer (intomobile.com)
• iOS 5 Jailbroken (apple.slashdot.org)
• iOS 5 already jailbroken (edibleapple.com)

Twitter Launch a Photo-Sharing Service

Twitter announced to the world that Twitter was going to be rolling out its very own photo-sharing service over the next few weeks.
Twitter photos won’t be competing with Facebook albums because it’s organized around conversations and is relevant in the moment. Videos, however, will still be hosted by third parties.

Twitter is also putting the “smack-down” on third-party client for photo-sharing services. The company has already acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. Recently, it was announced that Twitter had acquired Tweet Deck.

Twitter, developed in March of ’06 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year, has gained popularity in leaps and bounds since its launch. In July of 2007 it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter.
In only a year, this number grew to 100 million posts per quarter and now, with an estimated user base of over 200 million people worldwide, users of Twitter purportedly issue around a billion tweets every six days.

The company reports 13 billion API requests coming in every single day. Despite being censored in Iran, China, Egypt and South Korea, Twitter continues to see rapid growth and it is generally felt that this is due to the company’s commitment to keeping up with their user base and constantly striving to improve the service and its relevance to the user community.

Related articles

• Twitter introduces new photo sharing service, revamped search functions (venturebeat.com)
• Twitter announces integrated photo-sharing service, improved search (engadget.com)
• Twitter Launches Follow button and Photo Sharing Service (shoutmeloud.com)
• Twitter to launch its own photo sharing service soon? (benzinga.com)

How the world will use the internet in 2015

Cisco, one the world's biggest maker of networking gear predicts that in 2015

Internet traffic will quadruple and reach 80.5 exabytes per month (80 exabytes would fill 20 billion DVDs.

That year, for the first time, Asia will generate more traffic (24.1 exabytes per month) than North America (22.3 exabytes per month)—although Amercia still beats China (6.9 versus 5.6 exabytes per month).

Yet if traffic figures are divided by population, a somewhat different (and more meaningful) picture emerges: South Korea is and will be the world's most data-hungry country in Cisco's sample.

Even Canada and France (and, by 2015, Britain) will consume more gigabytes per month per person than America. As for China, it drops down the list and will be overtaken by Brazil, but remains way ahead of India.

Related articles

• Cisco: Internet traffic to quadruple by 2015 (news.cnet.com)
• Global Internet Traffic to Quadruple by 2015, Reaching 966 Exabytes Per Year (circleid.com)
• World Internet Traffic To Top 966 Exabytes In 2015 (tech.slashdot.org)

Chinese Gmail Attack Targets 'Senior' U.S. Officials

Google revealed the suspected source of a hacking attack on Gmail accounts: users originating in China.

Eric Grosse, engineering director on the Google Security Team, said in a blog post Wednesday that specific user account credentials were targeted.

Targets included government officials from the U.S. and "several Asian countries" as well as political activists, journalists, and military personnel, Google said.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' e-mails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings,"

"It's important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected--these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online," Grosse continued.

Google says it's notified those with affected accounts and has also secured the accounts. The company is encouraging users to add extra layers of security including designing more complex passwords, turning on two-step account verification, and only going through the company's secured "https://www.google.com" domain when logging on from a Web browser.

Google's blog post notes that "internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself."

Related articles

• Google says "hundreds" of Gmail accounts hijacked (marketwatch.com)
• Google: Chinese attackers monitoring Gmail of activists, journalists, officials (arstechnica.com)
• Chinese Hackers Targeted U.S. Officials in Gmail Phishing Attack (mashable.com)
• Google: Gmail Attack from China Affects 'Senior U.S. Government Officials' (techland.time.com)
• Gmail Hit by Phishing Hack (money.cnn.com)

Flight Schedules on Google Search

If someone were to tell you that Google just launched flight travel search results without using data it culled from ITA Software, you'd probably think it a joke.
You'd be wrong.

Google has added the ability to obtain flight schedule information for all airports directly on Google search results page.

Although, you’ll still need them to book your tickets, but for a quick search for available flights, you no longer have to open another website.

To quickly find out which airlines serve a specific route and when they fly, simply type “flights from "your city" to "destination city" ”.

So Google's flight search move is clearly aimed at planting a seed for the summer vacation rush, which yields millions of searches and ads to pair with them. And that's Google's play here.

Related articles

• Google Search Now Shows Flight Schedules [News] (makeuseof.com)
• Google starts adding flight schedules in search results (lookatvietnam.com)
• Google Starts Adding Flight Schedules And Airline Routes In Search (techcrunch.com)
• Google Adds Flight Info to Search Results (searchenginewatch.com)

How To Stop People From Adding You To Facebook Groups

How can you stop people from adding you to Facebook Groups automatically?
The answer is, you cannot.
The only option you have is to leave the group and contact the friend to let them know that you do not want to be part of the group.
If you get re-added, your only option is to leave again and / or remove the friend who has added you from the friend list.

Here is how you leave groups.

Click on Groups on your Facebook profile page.

The groups link is located near the top right corner of the page.

There you see a list of all groups that you are a member of. To leave a group, hover your mouse cursor over the group. A blue x is displayed next to the group. Click on the x to leave the group.

You will get a remove group membership confirmation prompt. Select Remove if you are sure and want to leave the selected group on Facebook.

Related articles

• How to Remove Yourself From a Facebook Group (lockergnome.com)