Automatically Move Photos to Folders Based on Exif Date

If you want to automatically move and sort your photos to directories based on the specific date the photo was taken, I suggest you to try a free program called PhotoMove.

Simply choose the directory where your photos are saved, choose the directory under which you want the date sorted files to go and then click on the ‘Find Photos’ Button.

PhotoMove is based on the Perl library ExifTool, using which you can either move or copy your photos to date based subdirectories.

Wait for it to finish scanning and the program will show the number of files found and number of photos that has a valid EXIF creation dates. Then click on either ‘Copy Image Files’ or ‘Move Image Files’.

By the way PhotoMove operates on all files with embedded Exif data, not necessarily picture files.

So if the source folder contain other files that uses Exif to store dates such as Microsoft Excel files (.xls) and Adobe Acrobat PDF files (.pdf), these will get moved or copied as well.

So pay attention to what directories you pick to move or copy files from.

For Command Line users I recommend you the ExifTool by Phil Harvey

283,000 Car Owners Lose Personal Data From HONDA

Japanese carmaker Honda is confronting a theft of personal information from 283,000 Honda and Acura customers in Canada.


Executive vice-president and chief compliance officer at Honda Canada Inc., confirmed Thursday that names, addresses and vehicle identification numbers were taken from the company's e-commerce websites myHonda and myAcura.

In a letter to affected vehicle owners dated May 13, Honda Canada said it was alerted by unusual volume on the sites, including “some unauthorized attempts to access account information.” The letter said financial information was not compromised.

Honda, which does not sell customer data to third parties, is investigating the incident, which has been reported to police. Perpetrators have not been identified and no group has claimed responsibility.

The letter warns of “possible improper access of information,” but said customers are not at risk for fraud and identity theft. Chenkin said federal and provincial privacy commissions were notified and customers were warned of the breach “as soon as possible.”

The letter said customers should be on the alert for marketing overtures that reference ownership of a Honda or Acura vehicles.

Online security experts said the information can ultimately be used to steal identities.
Honda late last year warned more than two million of its customers in the U.S. that an email database containing some of their personal information had been stolen.

The list contained names, login identities, email addresses and vehicle identification numbers of the Honda owners, while another list containing only the email addresses of nearly three million Acura owners was also taken.

 Related articles

• Honda Canada loses 283,000+ records, now faces lawsuit (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• "Honda Hacked: Personal Information Thousands of Honda and Acura Customers Stolen" and related posts (thenewspundit.com)
• "Honda Hacked: Personal Information Thousands of Honda and Acura Customers Stolen" and related posts (ditii.com)
• Honda Canada customers personal data stolen (globaltvbc.com)

Email Accounts Hacked in 15 Minutes

A recently posted video on YouTube teaches viewer's how to hack into someone's email account in just 15 minutes.

The video showed a group of volunteers follow an online "man in the middle technique" tutorial. It showed them learn in just fifteen minutes how to hack into a computer network. It went on to show them using the technique to obtain each other's login details and passwords.

To date there are an estimated 20,000 videos available on YouTube alone that teach viewers the basics of hacking social media profiles, email accounts, smartphones and PayPal accounts.

A report from the Daily Mail has already speculated that as many as 16 per cent of the British population have had their social networking profiles broken into and a further 10 per cent have suffered financially as a result.

Here's some tips to avoid falling victim to cyber crime.

Users change their password regularly and use more obscure word and letter combinations.

Leave any website that makes overt use of unknown certificates and pop ups.

Avoid sending data over unsecured or public wireless networks.

Always check the security behind free wireless connections.

If using a smartphone disable its auto Wi-Fi connect feature.

Sony PlayStation Network Restart in Japan Blocked By Government

Sony will not be allowed to restart its halted online game services in Japan until it provides further information on what measures it has taken since an earlier hacking incident, a Japanese regulatory official said Sunday.

A Japanese government official said the country has not yet allowed Sony to launch PlayStation Network within its borders because of concerns over the security of the service.

"We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them," Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, told Dow Jones Newswires.

He listed two areas where it requires further explanation before approval will be given following the incidents regarding its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment videogame services.

"The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference," he said, adding that he could not provide details on the outstanding issues for security reasons.

The second was in how Sony hoped to regain consumer confidence over personal data such as credit card information.

Sony began a limited and phased restoration of the services Saturday, bringing the company a step closer to normalcy following an attack on its systems that compromised personal information for more than 100 million user accounts last month. It said that it would begin bringing its PlayStation Network back online in the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East.

Related articles

• Japan says 'no' to PlayStation Network relaunch (news.cnet.com)

A Schizophrenic Computer Created By Scientists

Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.
The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."

"It's an important mechanism to be able to ignore things," says Grasemann. "What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia."

"Information processing in neural networks tends to be like information processing in the human brain in many ways," says Grasemann. "So the hope was that it would also break down in similar ways. And it did."

Related articles

• Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia to Better Understand the Human Brain | The University of Texas at Austin (jamespatrick1.wordpress.com)
• Scientists afflict computer with schizophrenia to understand human brain better (news.bioscholar.com)
• Scientists Afflict Computers with 'Schizophrenia' to Better Understand the Human Brain (mgitecetech.wordpress.com)

How Bin Laden Baffled US Electronic Surveillance

Osama bin Laden didn't have an internet connection or a phone, but for years he was a prolific user of email  by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe.


Bin Laden would type the messages on a computer that had no connection to the outside world and then instruct a trusted courier to drive to a cafe so they could be emailed.

The courier would then save messages addressed to bin Laden to the same drive and bring it back so his boss could read them offline.

The process was so tedious that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at the al-Qaida chief's ability to maintain it for so long.

US Navy Seals seized roughly 100 flash memory drives when they killed bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound.

The cache of messages is so big that the government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over them.

Related articles

• Osama bin Laden Used Thumb Drives and Couriers to Send Email (shoppingblog.com)
• "Bin Laden's Sneakernet Email System (slashdot)" and related posts (freshnews.org)
• How did Osama bin Laden email without the US discovering? (protip: not Hotmail) (boingboing.net)

Help Light Your Face During Video Chats With an Empty Browser Window

If you live in your basement or a place where you don't have a lot of light, your webcam may have some trouble seeing you.

The solution? Use the light from your monitor.


If you're video-chatting with someone, simply open an blank browser window and type in the URL bar about:blank

ALL Your Music From the Cloud With Google Music Streams

Google Music, the streaming music answer to Amazon, MOG and Rdio, is here.

You can access music in the cloud and stream to devices. But unlike MOG and Rdio, you can only play what you upload.

How do you use it? You use Google's Music Manager on your desktop to add your songs to the service. It adds play counts and ratings as well. It's a "full featured music manager", so you can search and do all the other things you could in iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Here's a look at some of its features:

• Library Upload: With the Music Manager app, you can upload your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries with one click. You can also upload by file or folder.

• Offline Listening: It's a pretty standard feature, but Google's gives this feature a neat twist by automatically caching songs you've recently listened to. I'd also love to see them do this for most listened songs. And of course, you can also cache specific songs you select. Necessary, since you can't re-download music from the service.

• Seamlessness: Any change you make to your Google Music library on one device is automatically pushed to other devices.

• Playlists: Once you upload your tracks to the Google Music cloud, you can play around with it just like it was in a music app. That means playlists which automatically sync across all your connected devices. They also have a smart playlist feature called instant mix, which will automatically build a list for you based on one song. It's like iTunes' genius or Pandora's recommendation bot. Google says that they have servers actually listening to the songs to make their playlist selection.

 The service can store up to 20,000 songs per user on up to eight authorized devices and took five minutes or so for the first 150 songs to upload.

But you don't always have an internet connection, or a good enough one to stream music. So you can either select certain music to cache on your device, and the service automatically caches your recently listened-to music as well.


You can request an invitation to Music Beta here.

White Hat Hackers Find Skype Security Hole For Mac

Skype has issued an update for all Mac users, due to security concerns in Skype version 5.x for Mac which allows a malicious user to activate code on the victim’s computer.

A security researcher said today that he found a serious hole in the Mac version of Skype and proving that it was possible to send a specific message to a user of Skype and it would crash Skype and make it unusable.

Gordon Maddern, says he discovered the vulnerability about a month ago. He was chatting on Skype to a colleague about a payload when the payload executed in the colleague's Skype client accidentally.

He created a proof of concept that can be used in an attack but is not releasing details on it until Skype fixes the issue. He could not find the vulnerability in the Skype client for Windows and Linux, he said.

Related articles

• Skype pushes update to Mac client for security flaw (tuaw.com)
• Skype bug gives attackers root access to Mac OS X (theregister.co.uk)
• A bug in Skype for Mac could give hackers root access to OS X (thenextweb.com)
• Skype for Mac Has Unpatched Security Flaw [ALERT] (fakeiitian.com)
• Skype for Mac Has Unpatched Security Flaw [ALERT] (mashable.com)
• Skype security flaw already patched, but you have to download manually (tuaw.com)
• Skype Security Blog: Security Vulnerability in Mac Client Has Been Addressed (blogs.skype.com)
• Expert: Skype for Mac hole can be used in remote attack (news.cnet.com)
• Skype vulnerability discovered by Pure Hacking (purehacking.com)
• Expert: Skype for Mac hole can be used in remote attack (news.cnet.com)
• Skype Bug Leaves Mac Users Vulnerable to Exploit (macstories.net)
• Skype to Fix Wormable Bug in Mac Software (pcworld.com)

How To Embed MP3 Files On Website Or Blog

How can you embed mp3 files into web pages?
Google audio player is a cool way to embed and play any music mp3 file on your website. This will allow your readers to play audio files directly from web pages.

To embed an MP3 file, add the following code to your web page or blog post.

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" quality="best" flashvars="audioUrl=LINK" width="500" height="27"></embed>

Replace LINK with the URL of the MP3 file. The file can be uploaded to any server or file hosting services including your own, as long as the file is directly accessible.

You can change the width of the Google audio player to fit your content width. If you increase the height, a black empty zone starts to appear, so best keep it at 27px.


Try to play the audio file below. It is embedded using the above code.