Hacker Ten

Adobe Acrobat PDF reader is loaded with unnecessary features that will take away your precious computer resources, if you just want a lean simple and free PDF reader to be able to read PDF documents, simply download any of these free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat PDF reader.

List of free PDF readers for Windows

Xpdf: Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files, Xpdf also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities.

STDU Viewer: STDU Viewer is a document viewer for multiple file formats. The goal of this software is to replace the multiple document viewers with a single simple application.

Nuance PDF reader: Nuance PDF Reader enables you to do much more than just view PDF files. You can convert PDF files to Word, Excel, and RTF via a hosted web service. Use annotation tools to highlight, cross-out, and underline text for more effective collaboration.

Perfect PDF Reader: Powerful alternative to Adobe Acrobat PDF reader with additional features such as exporting pages as images and saving filled forms.

Evince PDF Reader: Evince is an open source document viewer for multiple document formats. It currently supports pdf, postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi.

Nitro PDF Reader: With Nitro PDF reader you can create PDF files, comment and review, save PDF forms, extract text and images, type text directly onto the page, and more.

MuPDF reader: MuPDF has a small footprint. A binary that includes the standard Roman fonts is only one megabyte. It renders text with metrics and spacing accurate to within fractions of a pixel for the highest fidelity in reproducing the look of a printed page on screen.

PDF X-Change Viewer: The PDF-XChange Viewer is smaller, faster and more feature rich than any other FREE PDF Reader/Viewer/Editor available.

Sumatra PDF reader: Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Portable out of the box. This free PDF reader has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features.

SlimPDF reader: This is the smallest PDF reader in the World, it allows you to view any PDF document just like in Adobe Acrobat reader but without all the bloatware.

FoxIt PDF reader: FoxIt PDF reader is a small, fast, and feature rich PDF viewer for Microsoft Windows, which allows you to open, view, and print any PDF file.

There is no need for you to pay for downloading an eBooks, many websites offer legal free electronic books for download, many of those books have had their copyrights expired or are being given away by the author as a promotion for his/her products.

Sony reader eBook

Download free legal electronic books

Google Books: With Google Book Search you can either download PDF files of books that aren’t under copyright lock or view book excerpts in PDF. You can also search for free eBooks by author, title, date, publisher, and ISBN number.

Obooko: You have to join the site to be able to download free eBooks from Obooko but the process is easy and painless. Obooko has new free eBooks added daily, fiction, non-fiction and all kind of  genres available.

Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg has over 32,000 free eBooks for download. All of their free electronic books can be downloaded as ePub, Mobipocket, HTML and simple text formats, you will be able to read them with Android and iPhone too.

Free-Ebooks: Free Ebooks hasover a dozen genres of eBooks which can be downloaded as a PDF, mobi and .epub for mobile devices. You will need to register to download free electronic books and the free version only allows for 5 free eBooks downloads per month.

ReadPrint: Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast. ReadPrint has many classic free eBooks ready for download of well known authors and titles.

ManyBooks: There are over 27,000 free eBooks at ManyBooks. You can browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews from our visitors and find the perfect book for you to read.

You may have seen the picture of your life at Flickr and been unable to copy it with the Save as right click, there is an easy work around for this. It can also be used at any other site that does not allow users to save pictures and disables the right click function for image saving.

As long as saving a Flickr copyright protected photograh is for your own personal viewing pleasure, i.e. saving it to your hard disk with no distribution, you are not breaking the law because this is no different from seeing the picture on your internet browser.

Flickr copyright protected photographs

Anything you can see on the screen it is next to impossible to protect from downloading and saving, the easiest way to save protected imagess from Flickr to your hard disk is by using a screenshot program, take a screen capture of what you see on the browser and that is it you are done! If the capture loses some quality retouch it with an image editing program.

The freeware screen capture program I use to save and copy protected Flickr pictures to my hard disk is ScreenHunter.

Download ScreenHunter

Windows registry explained

The Windows registry is a database in which Windows keeps track of relationships between hardware, software and the operating system. Over time the Windows registry will become saturated with redundant files and broken links that will slow down youw Windows operating system and make it sluggish.

Windows registry cleaners explained

A registry cleaner is a piece of software that runs on the Windows operating system, issues involving the registry could cause you to lose your personal data, or make the computer completely unusable, you need to be very careful with it, all of the registry cleaners will allow you to store a back up copy of the old configurations before cleaning it.

The registry cleaner will scan through the registry keys and point out any issues which it finds, most usual are registry keys pointing at non existant files already deleted or to uninstalled software as well as pointers to missing DLLs, listings of no-longer-valid file extensions, invalid paths, invalid ActiveX Controls, and much more.

A registry cleaner will attempt to fix those keys, leaving your registry slimmer and your computer prepared to run free of junk once again. Some registry cleaners will also compact and defrag it making it easier and quicker for Windows to access the registry.

Sluggish computer

Free Windows registry cleaners

ACleaner: This two-button Windows Registry cleaner lets you search for problems and then fix them. You can choose which Registry sections to include and restore a backed-up version of the database if you encounter any problems.

AusLogics: Auslogics Registry Cleaner offers a simple wizard-based interface. You can choose between quick and advanced scans, and undo any previous changes. If you choose to run an advanced scan, the program lets you select the categories you want to target.

EuSing: Eusing Free Registry Cleaner will repair registry problems with a few simple mouse clicks, this is one of the easiest to use registry cleaners.

Comodo System Cleaner: Comodo System Cleaner is a powerful suite of utilities and tools that allows you to make your Windows based computer faster, more efficient and more secure. This is not simply a stand alone registry cleaner.

Wise Cleaner: The free version of this registry cleaner has no registry compactor (defragger), but otherwise it quickly identifies orphaned registry keys and makes them easy to fix.

Some of you may know Hide My Ass for their free cgi proxy but they also run a premium VPN for anonymous surfing, their VPN is a thousand times better than a cgi proxy because it protects every single application and connection going in and out from your computer to the wild wild web.

Hide My Ass VPN encrypts your internet traffic and hides your real computer IP from hackers and stalkers as well as repressive regimes. They have SMTP on port 25 blocked because of abuse by spammers but this is not a problem, you can still use webmail and the sender IP will be replaced by one of Hide My Ass VPN servers.

A VPN for anonymous internet surfing will also get around internet censorship filters implemented by some countries ISPs, like the one they have in China and Australia. Hide My Ass provides PPTP as well as OpenVPN for the same price, I have only used the more secure OpenVPN and this review is based on that.

Hide My Ass VPN Advantages

There is a wide range of servers all over the World, at the time of writing you have a dozen servers in the US, four servers in the UK, three servers in Canada, and single servers in Sweden, Holland, Germany(x2), Estonia and Russia. Hide My Ass VPN service has been adding new servers all the time since I signed up with them 6 months ago.

I have found some Hide My Ass US VPNs IP has been blocked by Hulu and I easily got around this by simply choosing a different US VPN location, I have never found myself in a situation where every single US server was blocked. I have also used the Canadian servers to watch online TV at CTV.ca and Globaltv.com (only for Canadian residents), as well as listening to Slacker.com radio online, also limited to US and Canada residents only, I never experienced any problem doing this from abroad while using a Hide My Ass VPN located in North America.

The speed I usually get on Hide My Ass VPN servers is around 4MB download and my ISP provides me with 6MB ADSL downloads, occasionally you will find HMA VPN servers with 1MB speeds changing location will solve this.

I am normally able to watch free movies online at Crackle.com , Hulu.com and Cwtv.com with just 1MB of bandwidth. I find Hide My Ass speed download speeds more than acceptable for my requirements.

Assuming Hide My Ass VPN FAQ is honest, they say that their VPN logs are kept for one week, this is a sensible length of time, enough to catch abusers and not extremely privacy invasive. Those logs, according to them, do not contain what sites you visit, they only contain what user had certain IP on what date from what time to what time.

Hide My Ass VPN interface

Hide My Ass VPN Disadvantages

Hide My Ass VPN client seems to have problems remembering your password, during all the 6 months I have been using it I have been getting frequent errors saying my password and username were wrong, to solve this fake errors you will need to keep entering your password until Hide My Ass VPN client accepts it, usually at the third attempt.

The worst part of Hide My Ass VPN client is that when you get disconnected from the network for whatever reason you will be surfing with your real IP and the VPN client makes no attempt whatsoever to warn you, instead it tries to reconnect, there is a good chance your real IP will be exposed during that time.

If you want to use Hide My Ass VPN on a BSD or Solaris system you are out of luck because it only works on Windows, MAC and Linux and the client needs to be installed.

Hide My Ass VPN Review conclusion

Hide my Ass is great to watch US and Canadian TV online, the reliability and server speed is more than acceptable for this, as well as the wide range of locations they offer. Support always replies to email and they are quick and helpful, forget about their forum and IRC channel, if you have a problem email Hide My Ass instead!

I give Hide My Ass VPN service a rating of %90 satisfaction, I will happily renew their services when my yearly subscription expires. Hide My Ass only needs to polish their VPN client about not warning you when the VPN is disconnected, and I will then increase my satisfaction rating at %99.

Visit Hide My Ass VPN

Review Countermail

If you care about privacy you will be using encryption for your emails, you would not write on a postcard everything you says on an email right? If you are not using encryption to send emails then it is as if you wrote it on the outside of an envelope and it can easily be read by anyone who knows how to use a packer sniffer, such as WireShark.

Hushmail has now a competitor, and it is called Countermail. I have been using it for the last few days and their capabilities to keep email private should satisfy most users.. If you send email to a person that have a public PGP/OpenPGP-key you can first import his/her key and then the email will be encrypted automatically.

Countermail is easy to use by newbies, and it is compatible with Hushmail users, which it means communications between Hushmail and Countermail will be encrypted, after setting up Hushmail following the instructions given by Countermail FAQ.

If you are sending email to a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail address encryption will not work but your message will still be digitally signed with you public key making it impossible for someone to supplant your identity.

Countermail sending encrypted anonymous email

Anonymous email provider

Countermail will also make you anonymous hiding your IP on the headers and it uses the standard OpenPGP for encryption.

What I liked most of Countermail is that the sign up process is really simple, you do not get asked for personal information, Countermail will not store you name and address after a credit card payment is verified and finished.

There is no backdoor access CounterMail accounts, your encrypted email can only be decrypted with your own secret passphrase and private key, if you lose them that is it. Even the calendar at Countermail is encrypted.

I checked the headers while sending myself an email and they appear to be based in Sweden, the IP revealed that location.

Countermail diskless web server is a unique security feature, this will prevent IP-addresses leaking to a hard drive, if someone steals the web server they will find nothing, their mail server uses hard drives to store the encrypted messages, but all messages are stored encrypted.

Anonymous encrypted email service Countermail features

• True end-to-end security

• Anonymous email header

• Easy installation with a certified Java applet

• Portable and secure email from any browser

• Windows, Linux and MacOS support

• Time Delayed sending*

• Encrypted file storage/sharing*

• Use your own domain name*

• Encrypted chat*

Conclusion Countermail review

Countermail diskless unique web servers starting from a CD-ROM are a far superior privacy guarantee than that of Hushmail and other similar services.

Their sign up process is very simple and they will not keepuser  identifiable details. Being compatible with OpenPGP encryption is a plus, as well as hiding the sender computer IP on the headers.

The only downside of Countermail is that there is no free account option with reduced mailbox, such as the one Hushmail has, but if you are willing to pay for a premium anonymous encrypted email service, Countermail is well worth the money and stands out of the competition.

Visit Anonymous encrypted email service Countermail

OpenOffice and Word documents hold hidden information that includes revision logs, author name, comments, saved dates, keywords and much more, all this is called metadata and you may want to erase it for good if you are posting it to the internet or sending it to someone else as it may contain private information that was not meant to be released in public.

There is a free program called Doc Scrubber that will easily delete all of your OpenOffice or Word document,( right now it does not work with .docx).

Doc Scrubber settings

Doc Scrubber can also produce an analysis of any Word and OpenOffice document to show what metadata it contains.

Download Doc Scrubber for free

There are various tools to bypass ISP censorship filters impossed by some Governments around the World. Flickr is blocked at various Middle East countries, thankfully there is an easy Firefox addon to bypass censorship and access Flickr.

Just install the extension and restart your browser, there is no configuration, no menu, no icon. All needed configurations is done automatically.

Download Access Flickr Firefox Addon

If you want to access more sites besides flickr, there are also some Firefox extensions that will allow you to do this easily.

Chinese police raid an illegal internet cafe

FoxyProxy: is an advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefox’s limited proxying capabilities. It offers more features than SwitchProxy, ProxyButton, QuickProxy, xyzproxy, ProxyTex, TorButton, etc.

Download FoxyProxy Firefox Addon

AutoProxy: With Autoproxy you no longer need to switch your proxy status between on & off manually. If you prefer to visit a website via proxy, just add it’s domain to AutoProxy’s preference.

Download AutoProxy Firefox Addon

If you need a free VPN instead check out my List of free VPN for anonymous internet browsing

To those of you who shared your personal stories on Facebook and now regret it, deleting the account will solve future embarassments, although if you do not trust Facebook then use fake data, that is the best thing you can do to protect your privacy.

There is an unofficial Facebook group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account” with step-by-step instructions.

To delete your facebook account just visit:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Click submit, then wait two weeks for your account to be deactivated. Logging in to Facebook before the two weeks are up will void the deletion request, make sure once you request deletion you do not log in again.

Deleting social networking sites accounts

Information on how to delete your account from all of the major social networking sites and services across the web can be found at Deleteyouraccount.

To erase all of your data at LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Google and other social networking sites simply visit:

DeleteYourAccount.com

There may be many reasons why you want to use a VPN, just bypass your local school internet filtering, the Great firewall of China of the blocking of Hulu and other online TV websites to non US IPs, whatever your choice, you have now available some free VPN to do that.

Some of the free VPNs, like Anchorfree, are financed through advertisement, this means you will have to view a small banner while surfing the internet, but other than this it works fine.

Other of the free VPN have time, bandwith and data download restrictions, and most of them, if not all, will not allow you to use Bit torrent through the VPN, you will need a paid solution for this.

List of free VPN for anonymous internet surfing

• Comodo Easy VPN
  
• UltraSurf
  
• The Free VPN
  
• HotSpot Shield
  
• Internet No Limit

No logs premium VPN

If you need a realiable premium no logs VPN provider that will get around internet filters and provide you with secure and anonymous internet browsing, try Invisible Browsing VPN.