Converting your PC Into a TV - A Practical Checklist
07/04/2007 - 06:13
We are lucky to find ourselves living in a golden age, the golden age of digital imagery. Digital imagery has been slowly but steadily becoming an integral part of our lives over the last decade. And now it has reached a level that it has changed just about every way we interact with the World. And the way that the World interacts with us. Every form of digital media now is faster, clearer, better and less expensive.
One of greatest breakthroughs in the early part of the 21st century is the widespread availability of satellite television. Where once, through analogical television waves, we had maybe ten or twenty TV channels available to us, now we have hundreds. The material available covers every spectrum of our day to day lives. It brings us news, documentaries, sports, films and light entertainment. Not only that for the millions of expatriates dotted all around the globe, television can pick up channels in any language. For the chronically homesick, this is an amazing development.
In the last few years, as personal computers become less expensive and more powerful the possibility of utilizing them as an alternative receiver for television programs has become a reality. Software companies have been pulling out all the stops to provide the best of applications to capture this fast growing market.
The software required to receive signals through the internet onto a home computer is not a major outlay. It can range from between $50 to $100. However before making even this minimal outlay, the consumer would be well advised to make sure that their home computer is capable of making the best of the software and the signals it will be required to process. In order to be sure of doing so, the computer should have a Pentium 4 I GHZ processor, sufficient hard disc space available to save at least some of the data to be downloaded. A good sound card as well as a powerful graphics card is also strongly recommended. As far as the internet connection is concerned, this is also a very important feature. The connection should be as a high and as wide as possible. Today it is possible to download at up to 3 gigabytes a second. Sounds a lot, but may well be necessary to make the package a workable one. See dvr-software-guide.com for more details on minimum hardware requirements.
By investing properly, the computer owner will be able to add all these factors together, to create a strong TV/PC combination.
User will enjoy having so many channels available through their home computer an interesting prospect. Each will find their own way of taking the most out of it.
Top 10 Windows Tools
06/30/2007 - 16:28
1. Cain & Abel - Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for the Microsoft Windows Operating System. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols.
2. SuperScan - SuperScan is a powerful TCP port scanner, pinger, resolver. SuperScan 4 (Current Version) is a completely-rewritten update of the highly popular Windows port scanning tool, SuperScan.
3. GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner - GFI LANguard N.S.S. is a network vulnerability management solution that scans your network and performs over 15,000 vulnerability assessments. It identifies all possible security threats and provides you with tools to patch and secure your network. GFI LANguard N.S.S. was voted Favorite Commercial Security Tool by NMAP users for 2 years running and has been sold over 200,000 times!
4. Retina - Retina Network Security Scanner, recognised as th
e industry standard for vulnerability assessment, identifies known security vulnerabilities and assists in prioritising threats for remediation. Featuring fast, accurate, and non-intrusive scanning, users are able to secure their networks against even the most recent of discovered vulnerabilities.5. SamSpade - SamSpade provides a consistent GUI and implementation for many handy network query tasks. It was designed with tracking down spammers in mind, but can be useful for many other network exploration, administration, and security tasks. It includes tools such as ping, nslookup, whois, dig, traceroute, finger, raw HTTP web browser, DNS zone transfer, SMTP relay check, website search, and more.
6. N-Stealth - N-Stealth is a commercial web server security scanner. It is generally updated more frequently than free web scanners such as whisker and nikto, but you have to pay for the privilege.
7. Solarwinds - Solarwinds contains many network monitoring, discovery and attack tools. The advanced security tools not only test internet security with the SNMP Brute Force Attack and Dictionary Attack utilities but also validate the security on Cisco Routers with the Router Security Check. The Remote TCP Reset remotely display all active sessions on a device and the Password Decryption can decrypt Type 7 Cisco Passwords. The Port Scanner allows testing for open TCP ports across IP Address and port ranges or selection of specific machines and ports.
8. Achilles - The first publicly released general-purpose web application security assessment tool. Achilles acts as a HTTP/HTTPS proxy that allows a user to intercept, log, and modify web traffic on the fly. Due to a cyber squatter, Achilles is no longer online at its original home of www.Digizen-Security.com...OOPS!
9. CookieDigger - CookieDigger helps identify weak cookie generation and insecure implementations of session management by web applications. The tool works by collecting and analyzing cookies issued by a web application for multiple users. The tool reports on the predictability and entropy of the cookie and whether critical information, such as user name and password, are included in the cookie values.
10. Netcat (The Network SwissArmy Knife) - Netcat was originally a Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.
