Wednesday, December 29, 2010

G.ho.st: A Free Web-based Virtual Computer for Everyone

Global Hosted Operating System or G.ho.st provides a free Internet-based Virtual Computer service. It includes the following that are available from any browser, anywhere:

    * Personal desktop
    * File storage
    * Applications

G.ho.st uses Amazon.com’s S3 Web Service that will keep multiple copies of every file in state-of-the-art secure data centers.
What is a Virtual Computer (VC)?

    * A service that behaves just like a computer
    * Includes a desktop, file system, applications, etc.
    * Is not physically installed on any one computer
    * Is hosted in a professional data center on the Internet
    * Is accessible from any Internet browser

G.ho.st features

    * Access your desktop, files, apps from any computer in the world
    * Manage all your web stuff from multiple service providers
    * G.ho.st is automatically updated, backed-up and secured
    * When you use G.ho.st there is no trail of your activity on the physical computer you are using
    * Easy to use

Screenshots

G.ho.st Desktop

image33 G.ho.st: A Free Web based Virtual Computer for Everyone

G.ho.st control panel

image34 G.ho.st: A Free Web based Virtual Computer for Everyone

G.ho.st Widgets

image35 G.ho.st: A Free Web based Virtual Computer for Everyone
Using G.ho.st VC alongside Windows?

At home, you can use:

    * G.ho.st file upload / download facility to keep your most important documents, music and photos on G.ho.st and access them from other places.
    * G.ho.st My Items to manage your Web stuff like links to Flickr, Google Docs, YouTube videos, etc. since Windows doesn’t do that well.

Using G.ho.st VC instead of Windows?

You can use:

    * G.ho.st file upload / download facility to permanently move your files (documents, music, photos, etc.) to G.ho.st.
    * G.ho.st Mail as your e-mail service.
    * POP aggregation to receive e-mails from your other e-mail services (as well as your new @G.ho.st email).
    * G.ho.st My Items to manage your Web stuff (links to Flickr photos, Google Docs, YouTube videos, etc.)
    * G.ho.st Browser to make sure that your bookmarks and cookies are available everywhere.

Pre-requisites

    * Internet Browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox or Safari)
    * Flash plug-in (at least version 8).
    * G.ho.st will run best on a reasonably up-to-date computer with a Pentium 4 or better CPU
    * At least 512MB RAM (preferably more if you have other programs running)
    * An Internet connection of at least 1.5mbps.

Limitations

    * You cannot run Windows software applications on G.ho.st like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.
    * The G.ho.st VC comes with 15GB of free file storage. More storage will be available soon via different promotions or for a modest monthly fee.
    * The G.ho.st Browser is currently in alpha (and has bugs), however already has most of the features of other browsers.

If you have more questions in mind, please visit their faq section. Share your comments on what you think about this service.

Link: G.ho.st

Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional

These are the best | few | easy tricks to make your wordpress blog/website ‘tough’!

Note: Many of the tricks below can be used on any website(marked by * | Non-wordpress as well as WordPress hosted websites)

   1.
      Redirection with cc logo Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional*

      CO.CC as you might already know, is a free domain(actually sub-domain) registration service. Some of the best features of cc logo Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional include..
          * Google Apps Supported
          * DNS Service: Delegate CO.CC domain like a .com
          * Changeable Zone Records: Co.cc supports for CNAME, A, MX, NS records!
          * Google Adsense supported

      There are many other free Redirection service like co.nr, .tk, co.tv but co.cc is recommended. You’ll understand the reason in the next trick.
   2.
      Subscribe to apps logo Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional*

      Google Apps lets you have name@yourdomain.co.cc email ID. Get a Standard Edition for FREE. Standard Edition provides 50 IDs. If you earn enough bucks by advertising, you can also buy the Premier Edition of Google Apps. Some of the best features of Google Apps Standard Edition include:

      * Your domain Gmail
      *Your Domain Gtalk
      * Google Calendar
      * Google Docs
      * Google Sites
   3.
      Free RSS/SMS Alerts of new posts on your blog*

      RSS Alerts

      Its simple! All the wordpress blogs already have a RSS feed. For your blog, it will be <http://yourblog.wordpress.com/feed>. Just replace the ‘yourblog‘ with your blog’s domain. You just need to tell your visitors or give them link in one of your posts(It is often preferred to make the post sticky). For more info & example, please see bottom of this post.

      SMS Alerts(by Google SMS Channels)

      These are the steps to create an sms channel and alert your subscribers via SMS, for free, of course…

      1. Go to GoogleSMSchannels.

      google india sms channels large 600x312 Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional
   4. 2. Set a nickname and register your Phone(If not already) and click the ‘Try Now’ button. Bottom Right, Highlighted in the above post.googlesmschannels Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional3. Type in the name that suits your blog. Choose Category as per your blog and Location as ‘none’. In source, choose RSS and type/paste the URL of your feed(not your blog)<http://yourblog.wordpress.com/feed>4. Click create channel.5. After the channel is created, go to ‘Manage Channel’ and then the ‘Subscription link to the Channel’ button. You will get a subscription link something like <http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/subscribe/YourChannelName>

      6. Now, Spread this subscription link!

      Drawbacks of GoogleSMSChannels–

      * Not available for Non-Indian users.

      * Subscriber requires a Google ID.

4.  Add Widgets

Out of the various widgets available, I recommend you using these–

    * ChatRoll.com Chat Room. There are various Chatrooms available to be embedded, but ChatRoll is much better because No, plugin is required, supports sounds, highly customizable, easily embeddable Discussions etc. are supported. To add it as a widget, check out this post. To dedicate just one page to your chatroom(if you get great deal of hits), see this post.
    * Dhingana Music Widget (Recommended only if your target audiences are Indian and your blog/website is somewhat related to Music/Youth) Listen to songs online. Afetr you add the widget, your visitors will ba able to listen to the songs LIVE on just your blog. Loved Dhingana? Add it to Orkut!
    * Add Fun polls to your blog. Lets get back to the official wordpress. Polls. Just as you open your Dashboard, on the right, there’s Quickpress, Click the ‘Create a poll button[poll button Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional] , then ‘New Poll’, create the poll and  save it. When done, open the list of polls, choose your poll and click ‘HTML code’. Copy the short address and not the long one(Choose the one [Polldaddy xxxxxx]). Go to Widgets page, drag the ‘Text’ Widget to the sidebar and paste the code in it. Keep asking the visitors about the website, ask fun polls.

5.  Contact Forms

I recommend Wufoo form creator, for the following reasons…

    * 3 forms avalable for free.
    * Easily Embeddable
    * No Ads, even in free forms
    * Highly Customizable(Create your own themes etc)

Go for it, create forms and link them directly from your blog. Such forms help to keep your own Email ID safe and also add to the looks of the website.
6.  **Logo

image30 Easy tricks to make your Blog/Website look professional

To make 3D header online for free(like this one), check out this website.

(source(s): co.cc, Google Apps, Google SMS Channels)

Links: co.cc, A post by Rahul Bansal on DW, Google Apps, Google SMS Channels

Is your computer really spyware free?

This article highlights a security vulnerability that has been detected in Microsoft windows NT-based operating systems. The security vulnerability was first discussed on December 27,2005 and attacks followed 24 hours later. Let us take you through about how to safeguard your computer against a potential spy-ware attack.

The vulnerability is found in your system32 folder, and the file concerned is gdi32.dll. The gdi32.dll is a dynamic link library for the windows GDI(Graphical device interface) containing pre-defined functions to render 2-D images. Now, the vulnerability arises in the way your operating system handles Windows Metafile (WMF) vector images and allows random code to be executed on a remote machine.

This security vulnerability allows malware to get downloaded through drive-by downloads. Now, although  windows metafile is extensively supported by all windows systems, systems from windows XP onwards have been found to be particularly vulnerable as they provide a handler and reader for the metafile in their default installation.

Machines running Macintosh, Linux etc are not directly infected. But there is a possible risk of infection if they execute a third party application which has the capability to render Windows Metafiles in non-windows platform. You can get your computer checked for this vulnerability by clicking here.

Typically, after installing anti-virus and anti-spyware, we think our job is done and that the computer is secure. But this just goes to show that, new vulnerabilities keep popping up. Although i have a robust system, on running a scan to detect if my computer is susceptible to this vulnerability, i found that i have a failed defense! Check this out :

image thumb6 Is your computer really spyware free?

    * Your only defense against this metafile vulnerability, is to ensure that you keep your automatic updates on, by default.
    * Microsoft since then has released a patch. You can manually download the patch by clicking here.
    * If you run the same scan once again, you will find that the vulnerability has been taken care of and there are probably no back doors in your computer!

image thumb7 Is your computer really spyware free?

So go ahead guys, patch your computer against this. Do let me know if you have any questions or comments to share.

Google to allow phone calls from Gmail

NEW YORK: Google Inc said users of Gmail will now be able to call telephones directly from their email, putting it in direct competition with Web calling service Skype and more traditional operators such as AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications.

While Google had already offered computer-to-computer voice and video chat services, it said that starting on Wednesday it will now allow calls to home phones and mobile phones directly from Gmail for the first time.

Google promised free calls to US and Canadian phones from Gmail for the rest of this year and said it would charge low rates for calls made to other countries. For example it said calls to Britain, France, Germany, China and Japan would be as low as 2 cents per minute.

Analysts said the service would likely be a bigger competitive threat to services like Skype's than to traditional phone companies, which have already been cutting their call prices in recent years in response to stiff competition.

"This is a risk to Skype. It's a competitor with a pretty good brand name," said Hudson Square analyst Todd Rethemeier.

Skype, which owned by private equity firms and eBay Inc and planning a $100 million initial public offering, has long allowed consumers to make calls from computers to phones.

Skype became popular by first offering free computer-to-computer voice and video services.

Like Skype, Rethemeier said the Google service will likely be much more popular among US consumers making international calls, than among people calling friends inside the country.

"Calling is so cheap already that I don't think it will attract a huge amount of domestic calling. It could take some of the international market," he said.

Another analyst, Steve Clement from Pacific Crest, said that anybody who is tempted by Internet calling services has likely already disconnected their home phone. "The type of person who would use a service like that isn't the type of customer who still has a landline," Clement said.

Google said making a call through its service works like a normal phone in that a user could click on the "call phone" option in their chat buddy list in Gmail and type in the number or enter a contact's name.

Calls that cost money will be charged from an online account that users can top up with a credit card, Google said. The service will not be available for making outgoing calls on cell phones because other Google apps already cater to that market, the company added.

Google shares closed up $3.23, or 0.72 percent, at $454.62 on the Nasdaq, while the shares of eBay rose 29 cents, or 1.27 percent, to $23.16, also on the Nasdaq.

How to write a professional Resume in 2 minutes?

Almost 3 months ago when I had just given my engineering exams and was waiting for the results to be out, I thought of searching for a job. To get a job you need to have a resume, and that’s where I got stuck. With all sort of different views around me, and different people it all just added to confusion. Some suggested resume building services but they were charging money for it. So, I was kind of searching for something like a resume builder but free and I found one. icon smile How to write a professional Resume in 2 minutes?

It asks you to login using your email account and password. Once given your email id and password you have to confirm it.

screenshot 065 How to write a professional Resume in 2 minutes?

There are mainly three sections:

screenshot 067 How to write a professional Resume in 2 minutes?

    * Compose: Here you can add the sections or remove them from your résumé.
    * Design: You can decide on the format or design of the résumé.
    * Preview: You can see how your résumé looks.

Why should you use this service?

    * You can add or remove any field any time.
    * Once the résumé is made, you can save it.
    * You can download it under Publish as a PDF or as a Docx file.

How to use it?

    * Go here.
    * Start writing your résumé.

The only thing that can be wrong here is that Jobspice can spam you with job mails that you do not want, in that case I will suggest you to make an email id for login purpose that is gone in only 60 minutes.

The usage is very simple and good. Do you know any other such free resume service? Feel free to share it with me through the comments below.

How to make free call?

The free call is provided by Free411. I will guide you through Yahoo! Messenger.

   1.
      Enter the number 1800-FREE-411 (1800-3733-411) where you enter the call number and make the call. This is a toll-free number.
   2.
      Wait for the call to connect. Once it connects, follow the voice instructions to reach the ‘Main Menu’. Say “Free Call” once Main Menu reaches.
   3.
      Once the system says ‘Dial the number’, dial the number using the dialpad in the international format.

2 2 Make unlimited free calls worldwide using Yahoo Messenger!

Example, to make call to India, dial 91 followed by a landline or 10 digit mobile number like 919876543210.

That’s it! Your call will be connected… The call limitation is 5 minutes. But you can call again countless number of times!! Sometimes a 20 sec long ad will be played when the call gets connected. Just listen to what the IVR (Interactive Voice Recording) says and follow the instructions.

At times, the system remains busy.In such case, call again, and it will work icon smile Make unlimited free calls worldwide using Yahoo Messenger! The procedure is same for Skype too.
This is tested and works in India. Try for different countries and enjoy free calling… icon biggrin Make unlimited free calls worldwide using Yahoo Messenger!

MySmartPrice – Check Cheapest Price For Mobiles Phones And Books

When it comes to looking up a new mobile phone or a book online, the first thing we look for is how to get the cheapest deal for it. Also rather than looking up individual sites and their listings, it would be really nice to look up and compare prices at one place.

With MySmartPrice we can look up the cheapest and best deals on mobile phones and books. The site looks up the best deals from several Indian online stores.
Searching for Cheapest Mobile Phones

    * I really liked the search features of this website when it came to looking up mobile phones.
    * The mobile phones could be searched individually or one can browse through results on a manufacturer.
    * I found the Android section also quite useful to look up comparative prices.

android mysmartprice MySmartPrice Check Cheapest Price For Mobiles Phones And Books
Searching for the cheapest books

    * Personally I liked this section a lot because it is very hard to look up good deals for books. Most times a not so popular book is not even available.
    * I looked up some history related non-fiction books which I have had a hard time looking up and I was not disappointed. I guess this is the advantage of searching across various online stores from a single place.

books mysmartprice MySmartPrice Check Cheapest Price For Mobiles Phones And Books

Do look up MySmartPrice if you are looking to buy a book or cell phone online.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Free Ram Optimizer – Clear up RAM on your computer for a faster computer

Ever since I was not happy about my Laptop’s performance, I started looking for a small handy tool (software) for utilizing the maximum of my RAM efficiently. And that lead to the discovery of a really neat app (really, its just 332 KB) namely – “Free RAM Optimizer XP”. Though you will usually mis-understand the name and will think that its meant for the Windows XP operating system, however I have been using it on my Windows 7 Professional version and it has never given a problem.
ram optimizer Free Ram Optimizer   Clear up RAM on your computer for a faster computer
The software is a small window which silently sits on your Taskbar’s Notification area and automatically keeps optimizing your system’s RAM usage. However you can easily disable the Automatic optimization and just keep doing it manually whenever you feel like doing so.
Don’t forget one thing that it just optimizes your available RAM, it cannot increase the RAM memory available. So be cautious while changing any settings otherwise it may lead to your system going dead slow.
My Personal Advice
If you are using the manual setting, don’t clear more than 1% of your total RAM at once.
Download Link: Free-Ram-Optimizer-XP

Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browser’s configuration

When it comes to browsing the Internet, Firefox is an unbeatable name. However, only a few people know that Firefox provides for certain configuration options which can enhance your browsing experience and let you speed up. Moreover, there is no need to install any add-on for speeding Firefox up.
Firefox browser logo Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browsers configuration
Just follow the simple instructions as below:
  • Open a new tab in your Firefox browser window.
  • Type the url just as given – “about:config”
urlbar Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browsers configuration
  • It will display a warning to you as given below and you just need to accept that.
warning firefox Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browsers configuration
  • Look for the following settings and change the values.
Setting name: network.http.max-connections
Default value: 30
Change it to: 96
Setting name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default value: 15
Change it to: 32
Setting name: network.http.pipelining
Default value: False
Change it to: True
Setting name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default value: False
Change it to: True
Setting name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default value: 4
Change it to: any value between 4 and 8
settings firefox Speed up your Firefox by tweaking your browsers configuration
  • Restart your Firefox browser to make the changes effective.
Note: These settings are Firefox specific and do not apply to your Internet server speed.
Drop in your comments on whether these speed tweaks really enhanced your browsing speed or not!

ePaperGallery.com – Read & Browse Old Archives of Famous Newspapers online”

I do admit that I get most of my news from the internet or the television, but I still cannot get out of my habit of reading the newspaper first thing in the morning. I grew up in Mumbai and now work in Pune. This makes me miss my local newspapers which I grew up reading. Also sometimes I wish I can look up old archives of some popular Newspapers.
Thankfully ePaperGallery comes to the rescue.
ePaperGallery 1 ePaperGallery.com   Read & Browse Old Archives of Famous Newspapers online
  • I could look up a few newspapers from around the world and specially from India. Also I could surf through the different editions –  city wise on the site.
  • Most times we can read the front page of the current newspaper, but if you register and login I could look up the entire newspaper.
  • One good feature of this website was when I was reading the newspaper I could also look up archives of that particular newspaper. This was really useful and I could read some papers dating back to almost a year ago.
epapergallery archives ePaperGallery.com   Read & Browse Old Archives of Famous Newspapers online
So if you are into reading newspapers and for some reason cannot get one, try out ePaperGallery to look up newspapers from around India.
Do drop in your comments.
Link: ePaperGallery

YouTube – Top 5 Tech Related Videos in 2010

YouTube is all over and just like it grew more influential in 2009, it continued its domination of being the number one website to share videos online.
youtube 2010 videos YouTube   Top 5 Tech Related Videos in 2010
Recently YouTube released certain trends to help people look for latest trends. I decided to look for the top 5 videos which were tech related. I must say all the videos are not really tutorials or highly technical, but it probably comes under tech culture.

#5. Google Chrome Speed Tests

This video demonstrates the lightening speed of Google Chrome with strange and weird experiments. This was viewed over 4.13 million times.

#4. “Take me Out” by Atomic Tom LIVE on NYC subway

This was a song sung by Atomic Tom on a NYC subway train. The video is tech related because the entire song was recorded and played with instruments using only iPhones and its applications. This video was viewed over 4.17 million times.

#3. Iggy investigates an iPad

Iggy is the name of the cat who in this video investigates an iPad. The natural curiosity of the animal along with iPad touch sensitive apps make it an amusing video. This video was viewed over 7.2 millions times.

#2. iPhone 4 vs HTC Evo

This video has two characters discussing the iPhone and is a sarcastic take on how people are looking to buy an iPhone only because of the brand and not so much know much about its features. This video was viewed over 11 millions times.

#1. Annoying Orange: Pacmania

We all realized this year that Pacman still evokes massive mania as Google found out when they put up a pacman interactive game as a doodle on their homepage. On YouTube is a video which has a fruit changing places with Pacman in the video game. This was viewed over 12.3 million times on YouTube.
Most of these videos show how Tech brands have become iconic in our everyday life and that is the main reasons of these videos becoming so popular. Do drop in your comments and let me know which one is your favorite among these videos.

Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to change clothing color in Photoshop. Its easy and fun icon smile Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
121 600x406 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
You can see the result in the image above.
Step 1 : Create a duplicate layer of the image (Press shortcut key Ctrl+J).
step 1 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Step 2 : Select the ‘top’ by lasso tool or pen tool which ever you prefer, here I have used lasso tool.
step 21 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Make sure your selection is proper as shown in the below image.
step 3 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Step 3 : Now create new fill or adjustment layer option from layer control panel.
(Refer image below) and select Hue/saturation option.
step 4 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Step 4 : Hue/saturation window will appear. Set the Hue at (-113), Saturation at  (+7), Lightness at (-34) or you can play with the settings till you get your desired color.
step 5 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Step 5 : Look for any holes or missing pieces. Hit Ctrl+click in the layer box.
Fill in as many holes as you can with the Brush Tool.
step 6 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Stepsstep 7 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Make sure that the foreground color is white and background color is black.
step 8 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Your Final image is now ready.
finalimage Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
I hope you had fun doing this. icon biggrin Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps
Do drop in your views and ideas through your comments.
23 Change Clothing Color in Photoshop in 5 Easy Steps

Google Bookmarks – An Alternative to Delicious

Do you still manage your Bookmarks on your local browser? What if your installed browser suddenly gets corrupt and you have no backup for your bookmarks? Even in another case, if you use two browsers constantly at a time, how many times would you need to synchronize between them. Think ahead of all this and start storing your bookmarks directly under your Google Account ID.
Google Bookmarks uses the same Account Login you use for your Gmail account, and hence it becomes too easy for you to manage your bookmarks.

Source: My Google AccountIt provides you with the following features:
  • Labels – Just like you create groups for your bookmarks, Google Bookmarks is all about labels. The basic difference between a group and Label is that you can apply multiple Labels to the same bookmark. So basically your bookmark stays at the same location and you just apply one or more tags, called “Label”.
  • List – You can create your own Lists and even share them with your friends or the Internet public as well.
  • Sorting – Sorting is ofcourse a well-defined feature in Google Bookmarks.
Now let’s discuss a query which you might have! You might be thinking that everytime when you want to add or view a bookmark, you would need to visit the Google Bookmarks website. Here, I would say that its not the case. Both Firefox and Google Chrome provides for an addon (called Extension in Chrome) which can tackle this query easily.
For Firefox Users:
You can download an addon named – “Google Bookmarks for Firefox” from the following link given below. This will let you directly add, manage and access all your Bookmarks stored under Google account through a menu-based format.
Link: Google Bookmarks for Firefox

For Google Chrome Users:
There is an extension even for Chrome users which is named – “Google Bookmarks” which automatically syncs all your bookmarks from your Google Bookmarks account, lets you add or manage your bookmarks and presents them to you in a light & small window without hampering your browsing experience.
Link: Google Bookmarks for Chrome

Since Delicious’s future is looking bleak, I think Google bookmarks could prove to be a better option for the time being.
Link: Google Bookmarks

Chrome Extension to Speak and Search on the Internet”

Voice search is a Google Chrome extension that provides a method to search by speaking. Nowadays  most of the smart phones have the ability to accept voice commands and perform actions and this experimental add-on will allow us to search by speaking out the words we want to search on the internet.This is a really amazing add-on and goes on to show the capabilities built into Google Chrome.
How to use it:
  • If you want to search for “cats” just click on the microphone and say “cats”. If you want pictures of cat say “google images cats”.
Features and requirements:
It comes preloaded with the following services :
  • Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha.
  • We can also add our own custom search engines.
  • It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Github.
  • Requires a microphone.
Drawback:
  • Speech input is experimental and hence speech recognition is not perfect.
Link: Google Chrome Voice Search

Check out Improvement In Google Translate

Google translate is an excellent tool for translation of different languages, I was just translating some something through Google Translate and observed few improvements and started searching around. You might have not noticed about the few improvement Google has added in Google Translate this month. Google has developed automatic translation tools because they want to help people find information, no matter what language they speak. Below you will find three distinct improvements to Google Translate.

Improvements in Google translate

  • Alternative Translation : Google has added the feature to see alternative translations, which can help us understand the true intended meaning of the phrase, and provide another kind of feedback for them(Google) to improve their translation algorithm. See the images below how you can edit the sentences, to do so left click with your mouse on the word you will get alternate words for that choose amongst it to use.
         Virtual Keyboard : Google has also added virtual keyboards to Google Translate, because it is very            difficult to type any of the 57 languages that is supported by Google Translate on a standard           QWERTY          keyboard. Just look at the below screenshot, click on the keyboard icon appears at bottom-right of the text area to get the virtual keyboard for other languages
  • Speech Synthesis : One of the feature that user enjoy is to listen the text which they have just translated in other language. For this Google has added speech synthesis for three more languages and they are Arabic, Japanese and Korean. And dramatically improved another 17 languages approximately, so that we can not only see text translations, but also hear them spoken aloud. Few of them are as follows Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish etc.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Alien: Hypnosis & Abductions

An Alien Abduction is the removal of an individual or individuals without their consent from one physical location to another. During this procedure the individual may feel helpless, paralysed and unable to control their wishes. The purpose of the abduction is reported as being part of a physical or psychological experiment performed by non-humans. At the conclusion of the procedure the individuals are returned to their original location. The individuals may or may not remember their experiences.

Since hypnosis seems to be the tool most often used by researchers on abductions, it is important that the community of hypnotists and hypnotherapists become aware of the possibility that some clients might suddenly begin to experience a spontaneous regression related to their 'adventures' with U.F.O's.

"There are hundred of these people and the stories that they tell are strikingly similar and similarly incredible; they were abducted by aliens, taken aboard a space ship, poked, examined, sometimes scarred and eventually returned home".

That was the first paragraph from an article published in the Boston Globe on June 13th, 1992 titled "Abductees gather at M.I.T." Sponsored by an M.I.T. physicist and a Harvard psychiatrist, the closed invitation-only conference was neither sanctioned nor endorsed by M.I.T.

The opening statement of the publisher of the Roper Report reads as follows:

"This report to mental health professionals presents the combined data from three national surveys of nearly 6,000 adult Americans. It is the collective effort of a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a professor of sociology of Eastern Michigan University, an associate professor of history at Temple
University, a psychiatric therapist from Springfield, MO, an author and researcher from New York City and a large polling organization. This report on unusual personal experiences concerns the relations between these experiences and what can be called the 'UFO Abduction Syndrome'. The Roper Survey, which was conducted in 1991, suggests that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American men, women and children may have experienced abduction or abduction-related phenomena.

This article and the survey, which was based on 5,947 Americans, are not intended to convince anyone that this phenomenon exists. The findings show that the experiences known to be associated with abductions are surprisingly prevalent in the American population. Of 1,868 people, 1,033 reported one experience; 484 reported two experiences; 238 reported three experiences; 10l reported four experiences and 18 reported 5 experiences. The incidence of abduction experiences are reported as being two percent of the population. Indications are that the percentage might actually be somewhat higher. With 6,000 respondents for the study, one out of every fifty Americans may have had UFO abduction experiences. The conclusion can be drawn that UFO abduction experiences are much more common than many professionals are aware of.
With this staggering number of people it is not unlikely that many therapists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists as well as hypnotists and hypnotherapists may encounter people who belong to that group.

A frequently raised question is:-

Is it possible that these reports of abductions are, or might be indicative of, psychotic conditions or people suffering from severe psychopathology? Consistent reports from clinicians with reputable practices and credentials state that the percentage of people with psychopathology who seek attention and perpetuate hoaxes have been documented to be less than five percent. One also wonders what purpose a hoax would fulfill to a person who is fearful of telling others and thus receiving unwelcome publicity ?
Another interesting point is that similar detailed reports have been submitted by people from different parts of the world. Finally, many of the people interviewed or seeking help would prefer to be seen as mentally unbalanced rather than having had these experiences. Some mental health professionals are quick to jump in and categorize those individuals as paranoid, delusional or psychotic because such encounters are so incredible that they are interpreted as pure fantasy.
In researching the field, it appears that many children are also reporting similar incidents. How do we definitely know that these experiences do or do not exist? If we allow ourselves, as therapists in any field of mental health, to deny the existence of such a phenomenon are we then not closing the door to people who have finally taken the risk of ridicule in order to share their experiences? They need to be listened to. Our belief system must not interfere with our clinical judgment. When we allow our own sets of beliefs to contaminate our judgment then our effectiveness is greatly impaired. Refuting or rejecting the possibility of the abduction phenomenon does not negate the possibility of its existence.
Dr. David Jacobs, in his book, "Secret Life," reports that the foremost problem the abductees have is the emotional isolation. Although the abductees desperately want to discuss the phenomenon with friends and relatives they find it difficult to tell anyone about their experiences for fear of ridicule.
In a column written by Dr. Thomas Bullard, one of the foremost Ufologists today, he states "hypnosis has become a basic tool for the investigation of missing time. The apparent memory block yields to hypnosis and releases the full and fantastic abduction story to conscious recall. When people with vague misgivings, partial memories or life-long obsessions recover abduction memories under hypnosis, they are often able to fit together the loose pieces of their lives, gaining an understanding and measure of control over the disturbing after effects of these experiences."
John Carpenter, in his article "The Reality of the Abduction Phenomenon," states "There are those who claim that it is their altered state of mind during hypnosis which is responsible for the creation of an abduction scenario. Other concerns are that the subject desires and expects abduction tales and the hypnotist subtly leads the client who is very suggestible in that state of mind. It has even been suggested that a psychic client can read the hypnotist's thoughts and knows how to respond." He further states that about one third of abduction experiences are recalled without any use of clinical hypnosis.
There are many visual sightings of UFO occupants from around the world. The most common ones are frequently described as being 4 1/2 ft tall, skinny, gray humanoids with large heads and big eyes.
Many of the documented "leaks" from scattered military and governmental sources regarding the clandestine retrieval of crash sources and alien bodies consistently describe the same skinny little gray beings that others are claiming as abductors. (Leonard Stringield, UFO-Crash-Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence Status Report) However, other species are also reported.
We need to be aware of our own system of beliefs and prevent it from interfering with the establishment of rapport, trust and confidence with our clients. We must put aside our tunnel vision, blinders, sets of beliefs and accept unconditionally so that we can hear our client's story unfolding. We need to remember that the client has taken a giant step unto a new journey of exploration. It goes without saying that the therapist must be well equipped to discern confabulations or psychotic processes while accepting the reality of the experience to that person.
Working towards informing the uninitiated abductee or therapist to the field, a work in progress authored by Michelle Guerin and this writer will provide the readers with guidance. Ms Guerin has been abducted several times. Techniques and procedures will be discussed and transcripts of several sessions under hypnosis will illustrate the process. Based on the authors’ experience and extensive exposure to support systems and networks, they have anticipated and compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions by therapists new to the field as well as from abductees about to have their first experience in regression.
The abduction experience usually begins with the visual perception of a bright white light in the sky, field, etc..., or the abductees bedroom. Electronic devises, and cars "go wild" or shut off. The abductee is paralyzed, in some cases, allowed to move only his/her eyes. One or more aliens emerge from the craft/light, and proceed to drag or "beam" the human into the ship.
Once inside, the abductee is stripped of clothing, and is lying on a bed. (Some cases indicate that they were sitting up.) One or more aliens perform intrusive physical examinations; probing orifices, extracting bodily fluids such as blood or sperm, and take tissue and egg samples. Implants (believed to be tracking devices) are placed deep into the victims nose, eyelid, forehead, hand, or foot. Recovered implants have been tiny round balls, or triangular mineral-like objects, yet to be identified as alien in nature.
The tools used to perform these examinations are unlike familiar surgical tools used by doctors. In many cases, the abductee can't even describe them. Sometimes, the abductees are placed in machines.
Communication during an abduction is limited. The aliens do not explain much about what they are doing or why. Communication which does take place from alien to human, appears to be telepathic. Victims also report a feeling of being under a hypnotic trance, and that they are reading his/her mind. Communication among the aliens is either inaudible by the abductee, or is spoken in an "alien" language. Some mass abduction reports indicate the presence of one or more humans undergoing the same abduction procedure. Their is no communication from abductee to abductee. Each abductee senses that the others are "out of it". (I have read one report where their was telepathic communication among 2 humans and one alien.)
After the abduction procedure is completed, the victim is placed back in the same position he/she was before, or released outside the ship.
Post Abduction Syndrome.
Though some abductees can consciously remember the abduction experience, many can only recall the memory while under hypnosis. Those who are abducted usually exhibit some sort of physical side-effects from the experience known as Post Abduction Syndrome. The most common symptoms are:
■ Lost or missing time, usually 1 and a half to 2 and a half hours.
■ Frequent nose bleeds, sinus pain, pressure.
■ Nightmares of the abduction experience.
■ Looking at an object and feeling like one is looking at something else.
■ The presence of mysterious stains, bruises, needle marks, implants, scars, etc...
■ Deterioration of health, loss of hair, etc...

Conclusion:
The abduction procedure appears to be highly structured and routine. Skeptics believe that abductions can be fabricated easily due to the vast amount of information available. Also, hypnosis is not a reliable memory enhancement. Instead, it increases the brains likeliness to fabricate. Some believe that a "true" abduction story can only be created by those who have experienced the phenomenon first hand. Finally, there are many that believe the Roper Poles statistics are not accurate and fabricates the amounts so to encourage and support the theory of mass aductions being carried out across the Globe.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

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Google Chrome introduces Chrome Frame Internet Explorer plugin

You probably know IE6 won’t die anytime soon and so does Google, but they came out with a solution. The Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer ( 6,7,8 ) and brings the latest web technologies to the self-proclaimed browser, which also makes it run faster.
Everything sounds just great, especially for developers, doesn’t it ? Well, it’s not, because the not-so-geek users that still use IE6 won’t probably install the Chrome Frame and they won’t find out it exists, for the same reason they didn’t upgrade to a newer version of the so-called browser or even install a real one, like Firefox or Chrome.
We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software.

Google Chrome FrameSo Google wants to make people emulate Chrome in Internet Explorer, but why would you want to do it ? Isn’t it easier to just install Google Chrome itself ? I can only see a few cases that really need the Chrome Frame, not being allowed to install another browser, though they might not be able to install the plugin either.

In conclusion, Google’s attempt does offer developers a hope, but it might be a dead cause, because of those that don’t want to understand IE6 must die.
 

GMAIL PLUGIN'S

!! This plugin is Unsupported
This plugin is longer being currently developed or supported by the plugin author(s). It has been replaced by the RSS Reader plugin.
This plugin may function without problems, however, in some cases it may be unstable, or cause errors. It is provided “as is” and may no longer function as GB-PVR is developed further.

This plug-in acts a little like Google’s own Gmail Notifier; you cannot read the whole email but you can see if it’s worth logging on to your mail.

Downloading and Installing

The latest version of the Gmail plug-in is v1.7
Download:GmailPlugin.zip (815 downloads)

Requirements

This plug-in requires CommonGBPVRUtilities and GBPVRUIElements (v0.6+).

Configuration

You can set up to three gmail/googlemail accounts using the GBPVR config app.

Using the Plugin

On start-up the plugin will check for new emails on all accounts. The Accounts button allows you to switch account, the Refresh button and Blue will check for new emails on all accounts.

Support

This plugin is discussed in the support forum. Please post relevant logs as they contain all the answers :)

Source Code

Download:GmailPluginSource.zip (150 downloads) (this may not be the source for the latest version, PM McBainUK through the forums for more details)

Known Limitations

None known.

Todo

  • None

Author(s)

Devleoped by McBainUK.

History

V1.7 (3–06–2007)
  • Added support for the CheckEmail panel.
  • Notifies user of available updates to the plug-in.
  • Various small bug fixes and tweaks.
V1.6 (25–09–2006)
  • Fixed a bug which would cause an “array index out of bounds error”.
V1.5 (27–7–2006)
  • Uses it’s own internal Gmail feed parser (no longer relies on the dated Atom.net library which caused time/date errors).
V1.4 (11–7–2006)
  • Major skin change! See comments in skin file for details.
  • Added full support for Sub’s “fall back to blue skin” mechanism if unable to find the required skin files.
  • Removed “checks for new emails on every activation” feature as it was causing problems.
  • Blue button now provides a quick way of checking for new emails.
  • Fixed an issue with mouse interaction.
  • Added greater translation support (PM McBainUK if you want the list of text strings that may require translation).
  • Added more HTML filtering.
V1.3 (6–6–2006)
  • Moved to .net 2.0
  • Now checks for new emails on every activation.
V1.2 (16–5–2006)
  • Small update in order to comply with v0.4 of the UI Elements libary.
V1.1 (8–5−2006)
  • Added full support for task images.
  • Skin tweaks.
V1.0 (12–4−2006)
V1.0 (29–3−2006)
  • Initial public release.

DO MASTERY IN HACKING

What Is a Hacker?The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.
There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.
The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.
The Hacker Attitude1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.
But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.
Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:

    To follow the path:
    look to the master,
    follow the master,
    walk with the master,
    see through the master,
    become the master.
So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:
1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece — and so on, until you're done.)
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.
(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.)
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).
(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)
4. Freedom is good.Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like ‘cooperation’ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won't make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won't let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.
If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself — the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming a hacker.
Basic Hacking Skills1. Learn how to program.
2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.
3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.
4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.
This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include programming in machine language, and didn't until recently involve HTML. But right now it pretty clearly includes the following:
1. Learn how to program.This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.
I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for "The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language" within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it "approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store"; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.
There is perhaps a more general point here. If a language does too much for you, it may be simultaneously a good tool for production and a bad one for learning. It's not only languages that have this problem; web application frameworks like RubyOnRails, CakePHP, Django may make it too easy to reach a superficial sort of understanding that will leave you without resources when you have to tackle a hard problem, or even just debug the solution to an easy one.
If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.
C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it's smarter to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.
Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.
LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.)
It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways.
But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages.
I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here — it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.
Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His "recipe for programming success" is worth careful attention.
Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models.
Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic...
2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.I'll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on a personal machine, and run it.
Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary — you can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.
Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple's proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things.
Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn't always true, and some old-time hackers still aren't happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsoft's muscle doesn't seem able to seriously dent it.)
So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You'll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you'll have fun, and you'll soak up more knowledge than you realize you're learning until you look back on it as a master hacker.
For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.
To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.
During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.
You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.
A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but it's a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
I have written a primer on the basics of Unix and the Internet.
I used to recommend against installing either Linux or BSD as a solo project if you're a newbie. Nowadays the installers have gotten good enough that doing it entirely on your own is possible, even for a newbie. Nevertheless, I still recommend making contact with your local Linux user's group and asking for help. It can't hurt, and may smooth the process.
3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; here's one.)
But just having a home page isn't anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page).
To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic...
4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.
Status in the Hacker Culture1. Write open-source software
2. Help test and debug open-source software
3. Publish useful information
4. Help keep the infrastructure working
5. Serve the hacker culture itselfLike most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers:
1. Write open-source softwareThe first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works "free software", but this confused too many people who weren't sure exactly what "free" was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term "open-source" software).
Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
But there's a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our community's hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, "the hacker community" and "open-source developers" are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was not always so. (For more on this, see the section called "Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Software".)
2. Help test and debug open-source softwareThey also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That's why any open-source author who's thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that's a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that's merely a salutary nuisance.
If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on.
3. Publish useful informationAnother good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.
4. Help keep the infrastructure workingThe hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.
5. Serve the hacker culture itselfFinally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.
The Hacker/Nerd ConnectionContrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — it's a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's OK too — at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe you'll get a life later on.
Points For StyleAgain, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking.
The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they're connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment's notice.
Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills — system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who's a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.
Finally, a few things not to do.
The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.
The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.
Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers). Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where it's legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness.Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesn't require you to believe crazy things.Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name. Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).Don't call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and don't waste your time on anybody who does.Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errors and bad grammar.
Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free SoftwareWhen I originally wrote this how-to in late 1996, some of the conditions around it were very different from the way they look today. A few words about these changes may help clarify matters for people who are confused about the relationship of open source, free software, and Linux to the hacker community. If you are not curious about this, you can skip straight to the FAQ and bibliography from here.
The hacker ethos and community as I have described it here long predates the emergence of Linux after 1990; I first became involved with it around 1976, and, its roots are readily traceable back to the early 1960s. But before Linux, most hacking was done on either proprietary operating systems or a handful of quasi-experimental homegrown systems like MIT's ITS that were never deployed outside of their original academic niches. While there had been some earlier (pre-Linux) attempts to change this situation, their impact was at best very marginal and confined to communities of dedicated true believers which were tiny minorities even within the hacker community, let alone with respect to the larger world of software in general.
What is now called "open source" goes back as far as the hacker community does, but until 1985 it was an unnamed folk practice rather than a conscious movement with theories and manifestos attached to it. This prehistory ended when, in 1985, arch-hacker Richard Stallman ("RMS") tried to give it a name — "free software". But his act of naming was also an act of claiming; he attached ideological baggage to the "free software" label which much of the existing hacker community never accepted. As a result, the "free software" label was loudly rejected by a substantial minority of the hacker community (especially among those associated with BSD Unix), and used with serious but silent reservations by a majority of the remainder (including myself).
Despite these reservations, RMS's claim to define and lead the hacker community under the "free software" banner broadly held until the mid-1990s. It was seriously challenged only by the rise of Linux. Linux gave open-source development a natural home. Many projects issued under terms we would now call open-source migrated from proprietary Unixes to Linux. The community around Linux grew explosively, becoming far larger and more heterogenous than the pre-Linux hacker culture. RMS determinedly attempted to co-opt all this activity into his "free software" movement, but was thwarted by both the exploding diversity of the Linux community and the public skepticism of its founder, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds continued to use the term "free software" for lack of any alternative, but publicly rejected RMS's ideological baggage. Many younger hackers followed suit.
In 1996, when I first published this Hacker HOWTO, the hacker community was rapidly reorganizing around Linux and a handful of other open-source operating systems (notably those descended from BSD Unix). Community memory of the fact that most of us had spent decades developing closed-source software on closed-source operating systems had not yet begun to fade, but that fact was already beginning to seem like part of a dead past; hackers were, increasingly, defining themselves as hackers by their attachments to open-source projects such as Linux or Apache.
The term "open source", however, had not yet emerged; it would not do so until early 1998. When it did, most of hacker community adopted it within the following six months; the exceptions were a minority ideologically attached to the term "free software". Since 1998, and especially after about 2003, the identification of 'hacking' with 'open-source (and free software) development' has become extremely close. Today there is little point in attempting to distinguish between these categories, and it seems unlikely that will change in the future.
It is worth remembering, however, that this was not always so.
Other ResourcesPaul Graham has written an essay called Great Hackers, and another on Undergraduation, in which he speaks much wisdom.
There is a document called How To Be A Programmer that is an excellent complement to this one. It has valuable advice not just about coding and skillsets, but about how to function on a programming team.
I have also written
 
 
 

A Brief History Of Hackerdom.
:How do I tell if I am already a hacker?
A:Ask yourself the following three questions:
If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, you are already a hacker. No two alone are sufficient.
The first test is about skills. You probably pass it if you have the minimum technical skills described earlier in this document. You blow right through it if you have had a substantial amount of code accepted by an open-source development project.
The second test is about attitude. If the five principles of the hacker mindset seemed obvious to you, more like a description of the way you already live than anything novel, you are already halfway to passing it. That's the inward half; the other, outward half is the degree to which you identify with the hacker community's long-term projects.
Here is an incomplete but indicative list of some of those projects: Does it matter to you that Linux improve and spread? Are you passionate about software freedom? Hostile to monopolies? Do you act on the belief that computers can be instruments of empowerment that make the world a richer and more humane place?
But a note of caution is in order here. The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive political interests — two of them are defending free-speech rights and fending off "intellectual-property" power grabs that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term projects are civil-liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into an explicit political program with suspicion; we've learned, the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and distracting. If someone tries to recruit you to march on your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, they've missed the point. The right response is probably "Shut up and show them the code."
The third test has a tricky element of recursiveness about it. I observed in the section called "What Is a Hacker?" that being a hacker is partly a matter of belonging to a particular subculture or social network with a shared history, an inside and an outside. In the far past, hackers were a much less cohesive and self-aware group than they are today. But the importance of the social-network aspect has increased over the last thirty years as the Internet has made connections with the core of the hacker subculture easier to develop and maintain. One easy behavioral index of the change is that, in this century, we have our own T-shirts.
Sociologists, who study networks like those of the hacker culture under the general rubric of "invisible colleges", have noted that one characteristic of such networks is that they have gatekeepers — core members with the social authority to endorse new members into the network. Because the "invisible college" that is hacker culture is a loose and informal one, the role of gatekeeper is informal too. But one thing that all hackers understand in their bones is that not every hacker is a gatekeeper. Gatekeepers have to have a certain degree of seniority and accomplishment before they can bestow the title. How much is hard to quantify, but every hacker knows it when they see it.
Do you speak code, fluently?Do you identify with the goals and values of the hacker community?Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker?
Q:Will you teach me how to hack?
A:Since first publishing this page, I've gotten several requests a week (often several a day) from people to "teach me all about hacking". Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to do this; my own hacking projects, and working as an open-source advocate, take up 110% of my time.
Even if I did, hacking is an attitude and skill you basically have to teach yourself. You'll find that while real hackers want to help you, they won't respect you if you beg to be spoon-fed everything they know.
Learn a few things first. Show that you're trying, that you're capable of learning on your own. Then go to the hackers you meet with specific questions.
If you do email a hacker asking for advice, here are two things to know up front. First, we've found that people who are lazy or careless in their writing are usually too lazy and careless in their thinking to make good hackers — so take care to spell correctly, and use good grammar and punctuation, otherwise you'll probably be ignored. Secondly, don't dare ask for a reply to an ISP account that's different from the account you're sending from; we find people who do that are usually thieves using stolen accounts, and we have no interest in rewarding or assisting thievery.
Q:How can I get started, then?
A:The best way for you to get started would probably be to go to a LUG (Linux user group) meeting. You can find such groups on the LDP General Linux Information Page; there is probably one near you, possibly associated with a college or university. LUG members will probably give you a Linux if you ask, and will certainly help you install one and get started.
Q:When do you have to start? Is it too late for me to learn?
A:Any age at which you are motivated to start is a good age. Most people seem to get interested between ages 15 and 20, but I know of exceptions in both directions.
Q:How long will it take me to learn to hack?
A:That depends on how talented you are and how hard you work at it. Most people who try can acquire a respectable skill set in eighteen months to two years, if they concentrate. Don't think it ends there, though; in hacking (as in many other fields) it takes about ten years to achieve mastery. And if you are a real hacker, you will spend the rest of your life learning and perfecting your craft.
Q:Is Visual Basic a good language to start with?
A:If you're asking this question, it almost certainly means you're thinking about trying to hack under Microsoft Windows. This is a bad idea in itself. When I compared trying to learn to hack under Windows to trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast, I wasn't kidding. Don't go there. It's ugly, and it never stops being ugly.
There is a specific problem with Visual Basic; mainly that it's not portable. Though there is a prototype open-source implementations of Visual Basic, the applicable ECMA standards don't cover more than a small set of its programming interfaces. On Windows most of its library support is proprietary to a single vendor (Microsoft); if you aren't extremely careful about which features you use — more careful than any newbie is really capable of being — you'll end up locked into only those platforms Microsoft chooses to support. If you're starting on a Unix, much better languages with better libraries are available. Python, for example.
Also, like other Basics, Visual Basic is a poorly-designed language that will teach you bad programming habits. No, don't ask me to describe them in detail; that explanation would fill a book. Learn a well-designed language instead.
One of those bad habits is becoming dependent on a single vendor's libraries, widgets, and development tools. In general, any language that isn't fully supported under at least Linux or one of the BSDs, and/or at least three different vendors' operating systems, is a poor one to learn to hack in.
Q:Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack?
A:No. Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness.
Q:How can I get the password for someone else's account?
A:This is cracking. Go away, idiot.
Q:How can I break into/read/monitor someone else's email?
A:This is cracking. Get lost, moron.
Q:How can I steal channel op privileges on IRC?
A:This is cracking. Begone, cretin.
Q:I've been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks?
A:No. Every time I've been asked this question so far, it's been from some poor sap running Microsoft Windows. It is not possible to effectively secure Windows systems against crack attacks; the code and architecture simply have too many flaws, which makes securing Windows like trying to bail out a boat with a sieve. The only reliable prevention starts with switching to Linux or some other operating system that is designed to at least be capable of security.
Q:I'm having problems with my Windows software. Will you help me?
A:Yes. Go to a DOS prompt and type "format c:". Any problems you are experiencing will cease within a few minutes.
Q:Where can I find some real hackers to talk with?
A:The best way is to find a Unix or Linux user's group local to you and go to their meetings (you can find links to several lists of user groups on the LDP site at ibiblio).
(I used to say here that you wouldn't find any real hackers on IRC, but I'm given to understand this is changing. Apparently some real hacker communities, attached to things like GIMP and Perl, have IRC channels now.)
Q:Can you recommend useful books about hacking-related subjects?
A:I maintain a Linux Reading List HOWTO that you may find helpful. The Loginataka may also be interesting.
For an introduction to Python, see the tutorial on the Python site.
Q:Do I need to be good at math to become a hacker?
A:No. Hacking uses very little formal mathematics or arithmetic. In particular, you won't usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics). Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful.
Much more importantly: you need to be able to think logically and follow chains of exact reasoning, the way mathematicians do. While the content of most mathematics won't help you, you will need the discipline and intelligence to handle mathematics. If you lack the intelligence, there is little hope for you as a hacker; if you lack the discipline, you'd better grow it.
I think a good way to find out if you have what it takes is to pick up a copy of Raymond Smullyan's book What Is The Name Of This Book?. Smullyan's playful logical conundrums are very much in the hacker spirit. Being able to solve them is a good sign; enjoying solving them is an even better one.
Q:What language should I learn first?
A:XHTML (the latest dialect of HTML) if you don't already know it. There are a lot of glossy, hype-intensive bad HTML books out there, and distressingly few good ones. The one I like best is
But HTML is not a full programming language. When you're ready to start programming, I would recommend starting with Python. You will hear a lot of people recommending Perl, and Perl is still more popular than Python, but it's harder to learn and (in my opinion) less well designed.
C is really important, but it's also much more difficult than either Python or Perl. Don't try to learn it first.
Windows users, do not settle for Visual Basic. It will teach you bad habits, and it's not portable off Windows. Avoid.
HTML: The Definitive Guide.
Q:What kind of hardware do I need?
A:It used to be that personal computers were rather underpowered and memory-poor, enough so that they placed artificial limits on a hacker's learning process. This stopped being true in the mid-1990s; any machine from an Intel 486DX50 up is more than powerful enough for development work, X, and Internet communications, and the smallest disks you can buy today are plenty big enough.
The important thing in choosing a machine on which to learn is whether its hardware is Linux-compatible (or BSD-compatible, should you choose to go that route). Again, this will be true for almost all modern machines. The only really sticky areas are modems and wireless cards; some machines have Windows-specific hardware that won't work with Linux.
There's a FAQ on hardware compatibility; the latest version is here.
Q:I want to contribute. Can you help me pick a problem to work on?
A:No, because I don't know your talents or interests. You have to be self-motivated or you won't stick, which is why having other people choose your direction almost never works.
Try this. Watch the project announcements scroll by on Freshmeat for a few days. When you see one that makes you think "Cool! I'd like to work on that!", join it.
Q:Do I need to hate and bash Microsoft?
A:No, you don't. Not that Microsoft isn't loathsome, but there was a hacker culture long before Microsoft and there will still be one long after Microsoft is history. Any energy you spend hating Microsoft would be better spent on loving your craft. Write good code — that will bash Microsoft quite sufficiently without polluting your karma.
Q:But won't open-source software leave programmers unable to make a living?
A:This seems unlikely — so far, the open-source software industry seems to be creating jobs rather than taking them away. If having a program written is a net economic gain over not having it written, a programmer will get paid whether or not the program is going to be open-source after it's done. And, no matter how much "free" software gets written, there always seems to be more demand for new and customized applications. I've written more about this at the Open Source pages.
Q:Where can I get a free Unix?
A:If you don't have a Unix installed on your machine yet, elsewhere on this page I include pointers to where to get the most commonly used free Unix. To be a hacker you need motivation and initiative and the ability to educate yourself. Start now...
 How to use Keyloggers – Detailed Tutorial and FAQsSubmitted by Srikanth on Sunday, 1 November 200951 Comments
 
Here is a DETAILED tutorial which contains every possible information that you need to know about keyloggers which includes how to use it, how it works etc.WARNING: I highly recommend that you read this post completely since every single piece of information is important.  >>  SniperSpy 
8. How SniperSpy works?I will try to explain the working of Sniperspy in simple steps.
1. After you purchase Sniperspy, you’ll be able to create the installation module using easy set-up program. You need to email this module to the remote user as an attachment.
2. When the remote user runs the module it’ll get installed silently and monitoring process will begin. The keystrokes are captured and uploaded to the SniperSpy servers continously.
3. You can login to your Sniperspy account (you get this after purchase) to see the logs which contains the password.
 
9. I don’t have physical access to the traget computer. Can I still use SniperSpy?Yes you can. SniperSpy supports REMOTE INSTALLATION feature which allows you to remotely install the program on any PC even if you have no physical access to it. For remote installation all you need to do is just place the module (refer FAQ-8) in a .zip/.rar file and send it as an attachment to the target email address (for which you need the password).
 
10. Can I install SniperSpy on a local computer?If you need to install to your local (current) computer instead of your remote computer, then the process is simple. Simply navigate to the folder in which you saved your module ( Refer FAQ-8). Double-click the module filename to execute it. Nothing will appear on the screen as the software is installed.
 
11. What if the antivirus block from sending it as an email attachment?Instead of sending the keylogger as an email attachment, it is recommended that you place the file in .ZIP/.RAR format and upload it to www.fileden.com. After uploading, just send the direct download link to the victim via email. Once he downloads the file from this link and run it, the keylogger will get installed automatically. 
I know most of you are new to the concept of keyloggers. For some of you, this might be the first time you heard about the term "keylogger". So to give you a clear picture and make you understand better I would like to take up this post in the form of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). Here we go…
 
1. What is a Keylogger?A keylogger (also called as spy software) is a small program that monitors each and every keystroke a user types on a specific computer’s keyboard. A keylogger program can be installed just in a few seconds and once installed you are only a step away from getting the victim’s password.
 
2. How Keylogger works?Once the keylogger is installed on a PC, it starts operating in the background (stealth mode) and captures every keystroke of the victim on that PC. Let’s take up a small example: The victim goes to http://mail.yahoo.com and types his "username" and the "password" in the respective fields to login. The keylogger silently records these keystrokes and stores them in the logs. These logs when opened up shows the captured "username" and "password" and will also tell you that they were typed in the Yahoo login page. Thus the keylogger loads upon every startup, runs in the background and captures each and every keystroke.
 
3. How to install the keylogger?A keylogger can be installed just like any other program. Just follow the screen instructions and you’re done.
 
4. Do I need any special knowledge to install and use the keylogger?Absolutely NOT! Anyone with a basic computer knowledge can install and use the keylogger. It requires no special skills.
 
5. Once I install the keylogger can the victim come to know about it’s presence?No. The victim will never come to know about the presence of the keylogger on his/her computer. This is because, once installed the keylogger will run in total stealth mode. Unlike other programs it will never show up in start-menu, start-up, program files, add/remove programs and task manager. So the victim can no way identify it’s presence on his/her PC.
 
6. Can I be traced back if I install the keylogger on some other computer?No, it’s almost impossible to trace back to you for installing the keylogger on other’s PC.
 
7. Which keylogger is the best?Today there exists hundreds of keyloggers on the market and most of them are no more than a scam. So I tested some of the top keyloggers and conclude that the following is the best one.