Post Your Computer Articles Here

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• 

  dipen30

  for good articles visit I.T Arena - Main page
• 

  Leo

  @ dipen: Post your original articles in this thread.
• 

  Leo

  Play safe while on Internet
  
  
  Internet, better defined as interconnections of various networks makes many things simple an sober to us. May it be communication or finding information. Internet has become playground for nearly everyone. Millions of users surf everyday, thousands of sites are emerging day by day. The complex structure of Internet was not so complex before. Now a days it has become easy and fastest way to communicate with world. Before we move ahead let's have a look at past from where it started. In mid 1960's the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of Department of De fence (DoD) US was finding a way by which different computers can communicate with each other. In year 1967 Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) meeting ARPA placed an idea of ARPANET. In year 1969 the idea became reality when four computers where connected to each other. The computers that were connected were from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the University of Utah. After that in year 1973 idea for TCP was placed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, then in year 1978 Ipv4 stepped the playground, emails started with powerful stance in year 1984, in 1988 Internet relay chat started moving towards goal, 1989 WWW interface by Tim Berners Lee hit the first goal and from there we never looked back and slowly with advent of search engines, then e-shopping, social networking, peer to peer clients made game more interesting. Then strong and destructive players from intruder team and security threat team came in play and made game very dangerous to step in. So now we are here to discuss how to play safe on Internet keeping your self safe from these threats.
  
  
  I apologize if the above thing made you bore but now we will concentrate on real topic of keeping safe while social networking or banking. Internet has become need for everyone since everything is to be done online. We will discuss some common type of threats which we may face while on net and possible precautions to keep yourself safe from them. Most commonly threats faced by people are password theft, credit card number theft, attack on your account, remote attacks on your pc. Mostly passwords are stolen by phishing attacks, key logging, sniffing and spoofing. In phishing attack you are redirected to the sites which look quite similar to that you always log in, best examples are social networking, email sites, banking sites etc. If social networking user is not very protective, its quite simple to hack passwords,even for a teen age guy who knows little HTML and jsp or asp by phishing. So keep eye on url from which you are being redirected. The another type of attack is key logging. In key logger a tool used to log your key strokes from keyboard. Many people don't know net cafe are hot spots for key loggers if cafe owner is novice, some owners are smart enough who use disk freezing tool like Deep Freeze to avoid such type of attacks and virus risks, he always asks you to restart computer when one user leaves so that if previous user has installed any tool then computer automatically retains previous state without any problem.
  
  
  Now sniffers are softwares that traps your passwords as plain text via packet sniffing around network. You can prevent sniffing by activating Secured Socket Layers(SSL). Now email spoofing attacks. In such type of attacks the attacker sends you an email without showing their email address, be aware of such emails don't open them. For stealing credit card numbers and account passwords key logging, phishing and sniffing are used. Now lets discuss how to prevent yourself so that you can enjoy problems free social networking and banking.
  
  
  -If you get an attachment from a unknown user, its better not to open it.
  -Don't open emails with offers asking you to buy very expensive things for cheaper price.
  -Don't open unnamed emails.
  -If you receive any email from bank for any offer or renewal or update of account with link its better to call bank and confirm for such email is sent or not.
  -Always keep eye on url of high risk sites like banking, shopping or social networking. And suppose you find some thing unusual or wrong, log on to original site and change your password immediately.
  -Keep strong and long passwords, long and strong passwords are hard to sniff.
  -Keep an updated Internet security suite on your PC.
  -Use SSL(Secured Socket Layer) so that data does not remain unprotected.
  -Many times it happens we were not aware of key loggers is installed in your system. A key logger can log key strokes only from keyboard, so better use virtual keyboard software, now a days they are bundled with every OS but i'll recommend to use a third party virtual keyboard.
  -Do not register any site which ask you to register for simple things like just reading a news article, or download the data for which usually no one asks you to register, if you are in bitter need of that just create a fake email id. I recommenced use Hushmail - Encrypted Email, Web Forms & E-Signatures to create fake accounts because it destroys your account if you don't open it in every 45 days.
  -Don't use same passwords for different accounts.
  -Even if you get link from bank or any such site which is related to financial matters better to log in with home page address and then surf to following link.
  -Don't input your email id for downloading or reading articles and news or something that is not valuable.
  -Do not input your email id in chat clients.
  -Don't purchase anything via credit card from site which is not registered for e-shopping.
  -While connecting to LAN make sure it is password protected.
  -Keep master passwords to prevent your passwords if you save you passwords in password bank of web browser.
  
  
  I know many things are left uncovered and untouched while writing for our protection and precaution while social networking and e-shopping. By the way we can still cover these things in detail someday. Until then play safe on Internet.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  @Leo: You should participate in CE Colloquium. 😀 Good article!
• 

  vishnu priya

  Good one Leo!
• 

  Leo

  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]When an alternative is available...[/FONT]
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  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] People go to computer shops they pay for a PC and soon a brand new computer is delivered at their doorsteps. When they start the computer all they see is Microsoft Windows XP running on it and they take it as granted that the OS is given for free with the purchase they have made. Most of them were hardly aware that an OS they are given is not free and is proprietary of world's most renowned IT company Microsoft and can not be sold or rented without their permission. Though their computer is product but their OS is a service by Microsoft and hence it is not your vendor who can just lend you anyone else's service for free. The matter does not end here the vendors also install other paid software and tools like Nero, Power DVD Professional, Adobe Photo shop for free. [/FONT]
  
  
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Most of the novice people take it for granted that it is free. Very few in crowd of crores know that the OS as well as softwares running on their PC is not free but pirated. And very very few from the above few, hate to use pirated software and they try to avoid the pirated copies of softwares, others think that the price for OS and softwares are very high to pay for. OK, for one moment think about you are buying a PC worth Rs.30,000-50,000 and a OS costing Rs.6000-7000 is very costly. This mathematics is really very difficult to understand. It is always better to buy a OS disk rather than going for pirated one. The fact is that people who know about pirated softwares opt to buy them verses original one because of low cost. Pirated softwares are cheap because the pirate has stolen that from the original vendor and selling them for his own profit. People don't know how it feels when you write thousands and crores lines of code, work hard for days and nights to create a software whose size becomes from several MB's to GB's by writing codes and by scratching brain buster logics to meet everything a user needs from a software, and someone else steals it and makes profit in market by telling this product is mine and for possible cheapest cost. Even this article will not become 100KB of text data when you save it as ASCI file and what about MB's and GB's of logical code written by programmers. It is not typing efforts i am talking about, it is about the hard work that is done to create the software for you by typing logical codes in programming language.[/FONT]
  
  
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] By the way we are not here to discuss this matter lets move ahead to main topic. I urge people not to use pirated copies of any OS that is commercially available better buy original one, and if you don't want to shed a single penny from your pocket just go for any open source OS's, they are also user friendly and thing that you needed in it is available easily, that is free of cost. Now, lets move towards softwares that everyone needs in every day life for editing photos, creating documents, burning ROMS, editing PDF's, and using download managers. People opt MS-Office for creating documents, professional softwares like Photo shop to edit pictures, Nero for burning ROMS, Foxonix Professional to create and edit PDF documents and the best place where they find these softwares on road vendors not in computer shoppe because of low cost. If you really need something cheap why not to try something really cheap, get software for free. Yes, i am not mad to say you can get software for free, free wares are softwares that are available for free and they are available for everything you want to do in your day to day life. Free wares are available for ripping movies from DVD, music tracks from audio CD, burning ROMS, creating and editing documents and PDF's, for accelerating you net speed to provide you proxy for free while surfing. They are available for everything, the only thing is that they lack little, in professional features available in paid softwares but they are sufficient for everything you need to do from editing and printing pictures to creating high profile presentations and documents. Following are some free wares that can be opted if you don't want to buy a software,[/FONT]
  
  
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]1.Free office suites:-Open Office. Org, Plus Office, Oxygen Office, Free Office,Plus Office[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]2.ROM Burning Tools:-ImgBurn, XpBurner,[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]3.Foxit Reader:- It is lightweight PDF reader which can also edit your PDF's.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]4.Free DVD Ripper:-To rip DVD's[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]5.If you want to edit videos Windows itself has a cool tool named “movie maker”.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]6. “Free download manager” to speed up your downloads.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]7.Go to #-Link-Snipped-# and download any video converter or DVD maker.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]8.VLC media player and K-Lite Codec packs are sufficient for playing DVD movies.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]9. “Raid to raid” will recover data for you free of cost.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]10. “Power defrager” will de-fragment your hard disk to pro level for no penny.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]11. “C cleaner” a free registry cleaner.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]12. “Picasa” and “Irfan view” free image editors.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]13. “Dev CPP” free program development environment.[/FONT]
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]14.Cam-studio free screen recording tool.[/FONT]
  
  
  [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Though there are many free tools to choose from some people will think why we should opt for free wares when they lack some features of paid software. For them first of all I will like to say its better to use a free ware from a pirated one and next is that most people actually never explore even the basic features of any software and they opt for paid one because they want more feature, seems foolish but true. And if you are really in need of all professional tools available in paid softwares better pay for them rather than going for pirated ones. My this article aims to put a step ahead to stop software piracy. I request all those who buy pirated software to stop buying pirated softwares when we already have an alternative available...[/FONT]​