Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News back in 2005. Martin started his career as a tech support representative at a large German financial corporation which he used to finance his college education in English, Information Technology and History.
He quit college and his job when Ghacks began to attract a large enough readership. He made the decision to become a full time blogger and webmaster, and has not looked back since.
Martin is interested in all things tech. His primary focus is on desktop operating systems, web browsers, Internet services, and privacy related topics.
He published the book The Complete Windows 10 Privacy Guide: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version in 2017. Martin writes a weekly column for fellow tech site Betanews as well.
You can reach Martin on Facebook or on Twitter. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to contact the author directly.
Martin has been quoted or mentioned in many major online and print publications, including Forbes, Lifehacker.com, ComputerWorld, LinkedIn, Reddit, Betanews.com, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, PC World, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Register, and more.
Martin's articles on Ghacks
Powerfolder is a great freeware application that synchronizes folders over the internet or local networks. This is for example pretty useful if you are working with a desktop pc and a notebook at the same time and want to synchronize data between them. It can be used to exchange every type of data for example music, photos, own documents or videos. PowerFolder automatically detects changes. Some key features are
Are you using webcams at home or in your company ? Maybe you wondered if it would be possible to record those webcam sessions ? Dorgem is a freeware application that lets you record your webcam(s). As you can see in the screenshot it´s very easy to use.
Google Trends has been live for a few days and it´s time to play around with this new google service and find out what it´s all about. By entering one or more search terms you see a graph that shows the search volume and the news reference volume for about two years. This in itself isn´t that exciting but the feature to compare results by searching for multiple terms is. You could for instance compare linux distributions or windows, linux and macintosh.
Rootkits have been in the press lately and it´s a good idea to be on the safe side and check your system from time to time to make sure it is not infected. I´am going to introduce two freeware utilities that scan your system and reveal rootkits if they are installed and running on your system.
Many people consider themselves to be very secure when they are surfing the internet and that very well may be true. However, there are some things that are often forgotten about. The one thing is the cookie. This is not speaking about the edible version with chocolate chips, but instead the file that a good many web sites across the internet that put onto your system that tell the site that you have visited before and what you have done.
Sometimes it´s a small utility that helps you the most. Did you ever forget a password from an email account, a forum account or another piece of software ? What did you do to find it out again ? Maybe the software / script had a function to mail you your password, but what if it had no option like that ?
Protecting yourself on the internet is at the forefront of nearly everyone’s mind these days yet so many people are careless when it comes to this area. It is easier than ever for hackers to break in and get all of the personal information from your computer in this day and age and few people are doing anything to counteract this theft.
AjaxWrite is a superb demonstration what Ajax can do. Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is a web development technique for creating interactive websites. AjaxWrite offers the basic functionality of programs like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice for free on the web. No need to purchase, download or install anything. Open the website and you´re ready to go. The only requirement is firefox 1.5 or newer, the operating system itself does not matter.
Maybe you have been thinking for a while to create your own website or a new website but have no idea how the design should look like. Maybe you aren´t the type to design a website at all (like me). The open source web design site offers you more than 1500 free templates that you can download right from their site. You can browse their designs by rating, date or name. Every page shows thumbnails from the website and the option to view it in fullscreen or download it directly.
Do you need network services if you are not connected to a network ever with your computer that is running windows xp or windows nt ? No you don´t. Still network services are running as default services when you run windows and this leads to security risks which can be avoided by turning them off. The configure nt services securely website has unfortunatly only a small section of their tips in english but the rest should be understandable while using a translation service.
Launchy might come in handy for some of you. The freeware tool indexes your start menu and lets you start every program, document or other files with a few keystrokes. The tool hides in the background and you can bring it forth by holding alt and hitting space. Enter the first letters of the file you want to launch and it should be found really quickly. When launchy found it you simply hit enter and the file loads.
Adware is another issue that seems to be plaguing the entire world these days and that means that people need to be aware that this is nothing anymore safe then the standard spyware is. There are many that will tell you that adware is nothing more than an advertising venue for online companies but that is false. Through adware these companies are actually collecting data about you so they can target your computer with advertising that will come up in parts as pop up windows or the computer can actually be hijacked and then all of your search options are then transported through the adware so the results that they want to bring to you can be filtered.
I´ve been watching the E3 conferences from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft today and had little time to update my site therefor. Just a quick link to a very nice website that helps you find the right linux distribution for your needs. The Linux Distribution Chooser asks some questions about your personal knowledge and your computer for instance and selects the best suited linux distributions that fit your profile.
Spam is a big issue these days and people are always on the look out for ways to stop it. There is little that we as internet users can do about spam because there is always going to be a bunch of people that believe that spam is a good way to get people to buy things from them. There is little to this theory because so many people are so aware of spam that there is little in the way of sales from this type of email that it is going way down hill and very fast at that. There is not a matter of people actually stopping anything from going on even though there is a big field of research that is trying to help with the problem of spam and how to stop it from reaching a person.
Why the hell do I need to restart my computer after installing this software, it works without problems without rebooting. If you asked yourself this question the little why reboot application might be the answer. Why reboot is freeware and only 60k in size. What it does is that it will give you a listing of operations that windows will perform after rebooting. (those are the operations that the newly installed software wants to perform).
Don´t you love those little tricks and tweaks that make life so much easier ? I love to download videos from google video for instance and save them as avi. A little trick does that. I also love to visit sites that let me download content without having to login or purchase a premium account. The site webshots.com has a database of more than 300 million pictures that you can browse and view as a thumbnail.
Open Ports displays all open TCP and UPD ports using a cli (command line interface). We all know the netstat command that lists all tcp and udp connections (netstat -an). The problem with this is that it does not show the application that uses the ports listed there. Open Ports lists the applications that use the ports which makes it easier to identify applications that should not be connected to the internet at all.
How do you normally send files to a friend ? By email ? What if the file is rather big but you want to send it anyway ? You could setup a ftp server and give your friend access to it. The speed that your friend can download with depends of course on your upload speed. Still, ftp servers are the number one method to swap large files. The best thing, it´s not complicated to setup your own ftp server, just follow these easy steps:
This is a helpful extension. You might know Tor which helps you anonymize your internet traffic or Torpark which is basically Firefox with an always active Tor. Most people don´t need to be anonymous all the time when they are connected to the internet. Some paranoids will disagree here but I think there is no need for anonymity if you want to check on the latest football scores or a weather report.
Yes, this is even better than the website that offered about 700 shows. Actually the 700 show website used content from guba.com as a source for their shows, but guba offers more of them. All videos belong to one of eight categories (cartoons, comedy, documentary, drama, foreign, miscellanous, music videos and sports).
Everyone has to start somewhere if he wants to try something new. I´ve been talking to many of my friends and I got the impression that many would make the switch to Linux if there would be some sort of standard, some fire and forget Linux that you install just like windows xp for instance. With Vista on the doorstep and TCPA (Paladium, whatever it is called now) changing to Linux becomes more and more attractive even for those users that don´t want to learn everything from the start.
This seems to be the watch Tv Online day, it´s crazy how all those sites pop up at the same day. Peekvid.com offers more than 700 episodes of well know tv series like 24, Buffy, Desperate Housewives, Family Guy aso for free. You can view them online or even download them to your pc. I´am not sure if this site will be online much longer but enjoy it will it´s there.
Channelchooser lets you view more than 70 Tv stations fore free using your favorite web browser. All you need to do is visit their website and click on one of the channels displayed there. You find all sorts of tv stations there, for example Music stations, Cartoon Tv, Game Network, Poker TV and even Adult channels.
Ok ok, I know that many people hate electronic music but the design of the guide to electronic music is great. You see various genres like house, trance and techno on the left side. Clicking a genre leads to a roadmap of subgenres starting in the 70s ending today. You recieve a description of the selected (sub)genre and see the development process over the years. Now, clicking on a subgenre leads to a short article about it and various tracks that let you experience the genre.
Don´t you hate all the different video and audio formats, all those codes and tools you need to play them all ? The VLC media player is able to play many formats including (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX) as well as DVD, (S)VCD and various streaming types. The player is available for various systems including windows, macintosh and linux. It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video.
Ghacks is running on a linux rootserver. It should be fairly secure but there is always a chance that someone might get access to it and comprimise the system. One of the biggest threats is the installation of a root kit which will be used to access the system at a later time and clean tracks of logins that might have occured.
Jamendo is a community website that lets you discover a growing collection of currently 1010 free music albums released under Creative Commons using latest p2p technology.That´s right, you are free to download everything using bittorrent. But that´s not all Jamendo is about. They have a very active community that reviews albums, rates and tags them and offers personal recommendations.
One of the great features of Azureus is its plugin capability which is widely used by developers. Today more than 50 plugins are available for Azureus, zeropaid took a look at the most useful ones, let us take a look at the plugins they mention. The plugins mentioned can be categorised to belong either to cosmetic changes, statistics, security, communication and time management.
We all know that CDs and DVDs don´t last forever, some expert estimate that self recorded CDs and DVDs last only for the short period of 2-5 years before they become unusuable. Many factors play a role here, some of them are the type of disk, the recording speed and handling and storage. So, what could you do if you have a medium that you can´t read / copy anymore ?
Is this my USB story week, lot´s of articles about USB drives already and more come out faster than I can type. So, I´ve found this article at watchyourend about "hacking" applications that can be run independently on usb drives. I prefer to name them security applications, all of those applications can be used for good or bad, means security IMHO fits better than hacking.
If you happen to run a webserver that uses linux or happen to run linux as your operating system for the computer you work with you should know the basics of the shell. Sometimes you quickly have to find your way into the shell and a site like linuxcommand helps you alot doing so.
It is sometimes a good choice to disable USB drives and still use other USB hardware. This is especially true for computers and notebooks that are publically accessible from time to time. So, to disable USB Drives you simply fire up regedit and browse to the following key:
The avi bug which makes it impossible to delete avis in windows xp by chosing delete from the menu or hitting del at your keyboard is caused by Explorer reading the .avi file to determine file information as soon as you move the mouse over the file. This causes 'permission denied' errors when trying to simply move, copy or delete these files as they cannot be changed while Explorer has an open handle on them.
This little open source application might come in handy for some of you. The input is a simple image which is then cut into pieces which are then saved as pdf files and can be printed out and assembled as posters. This is a great way to produce posters, the application is able to read lots of formats from digital cameras and the usual ones of course like jpg and psd.
It seems that the method that I previously posted is not working really well. If you rename the files windows will try and install the update again. Therefor one has to find another way to disable this, what we do is disable the execute bit on wgalogon.dll. That way, winlogon can't call it as a notification package at boot, and since WgaLogon is responsible for running and maintaining WgaTray.exe, no more tray popups either.
Microsoft Windows users who are living in the U.S., U.K., Malaysia, Australia or New Zealand have to deal with Microsofts next step in their fight against piracy. A user who opted for automatic security updates will recieve the new anti-piracy tool which will install and ask for a reboot. After that reboot the license of your windows operating system is checked. You might see the following message:
It´s wise to check your system components when you first start your new computer. It does not matter if you build it yourself or purchased a prebuild computer. It´s always a good idea to check if everything is working as intended. MemTest 3.4 tests your systems memory to make sure it is not damaged. It´s also a great way to test it when you overclock your computer / ram. This way you can ensure that it´s still reliable and does not produce errors.
To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, Frence or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should still see Yahoo Beta. If you don’t see it, go to options and click “Try Beta�? button. That’s all.
This little list might be helpful for some windows users. It is a detailed listing of windows keyboard shortcuts that most people don´t use because they simply don´t know about them. I´am not using many as well except maybe Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste the copied content and Alt+F4 to close a window. Shortcuts are a great way to work faster. The list is not complete but contains about 40 shortcuts.
You probably read my article about the bank heist in London where the robbers used a hardware keylogger to recieve sensitive information that allowed them to perform wireless transfers. The bank made the decision to super glue every cable to the back of the personal computer making it impossible to add the keylooger between the keyboard and the computer
