Hacker Ten

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

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.

We have recently seen Internet Explorer 8, Firefox +3.5 and Safari adding an internet browsing “privacy mode”, using it you are supposed not to leave internet cache, history cookies or anything else that could jeopardise your internet surfing privacy, but there are at least two things that still give away what sites you have visited.

• Cached DNS Entries: In order to be able to surf the internet you will need use a DNS server to resolve the URLs and this will be cached locally into your machine for a while to speed up your internet surfing, this entries also get cached in private mode browsing.

You can see this yourself opening up the command prompt inWindows, type command.com or cmd.exe at the search box to get to the Windows command prompt box.

Now type:
ipconfig /displaydns

Windows Command Line Prompt cmd.exe

You will see the full list of cached DNS entries, open up a new private browsing session, re-run the command again and see how the sites you just visited got added. Anyone with access to your computer, such as a noisy College systems administrator or your boss at work can see this too.

To clean up the cache just type in:
ipconfig /flushdns

• Flash Cookies: Even in privacy mode evil flash cookies will get stored into the %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects directory, and they can reveal what sites gave them to you, and what day and at what time you visited them, you can delete these flash cookies manually.

There are many reasons why you may want to spoof your referral website, privacy is the obvious one. Websites usually log how you got there, either by search engine or clicking on a link, if the latter they will also log what website you were visiting before you went to them.

Spoof your referral page

There are also some websites that will only make their content available to those being referred from certain place, the Wall Street Journal for example wants you to pay in order to read their articles, but they have an agreement with digg and Google News. If you search for a Wall Street Journal in Google news and you follow the link  through them you will be able to access the complete article for free, but there is even an easier way to read the Wall Street Journal online for free, you will need to fake your referral website as digg.com, you can do this easily with a Firefox extension called RefSpoof.

After installing the Refspoof addon visit WSJ.com. Then, in the “spoof” field of the Refspoof toolbar type digg.com. Then, click on the “R” icon to the right and select “static referrer”. That is all, you can now read all of the Wall Street Journal for free.

UPDATE: As of 1st December 2009 the trick above seems to have stopped working, therefore here goes another way for you to read the Wall Street Journal online for free:

1) Copy the headline of the Wall Street Journal article you want to read.

2) Visit http://news.google.com and paste the headline on the search box.

3) Clink on the link leading to the Wall Street Journal article. That is it, now you will be able to read the full article for free, the WSJ journal has an agreement with Google News to let people referred by them read the full article.

Wall Street Journal Newspaper

You can now perform a clean, full-featured installation of Windows 7 for the price of an upgrade.

Simply follow these instructions:

1. Perform a clean installation using the Upgrade disc, you should have no problems here

2. Make sure there are no Windows Updates pending — if there’s an orange shield icon next to the Shutdown button in the Start Menu, that means you need to reboot before attempting the next steps.

3. Open ‘regedit.exe‘ from the Start Menu — just type it in there, where it says: Search programs and files. Accept the User Account Control dialogue that pops up to give yourself Windows 7 superpowers.

4. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

5. Change MediaBootInstall from ‘1‘ to ‘0‘

6. Open the Start Menu again and type ‘cmd’ — use ctrl+shift+enter to run it as an elevated-permissions user

7. Finally, type slmgr /rearm — and press enter.

Windows 7 hacked

Your computer will now reboot and run the Activate Windows utility. Type in your product key, and there you go… a full Windows 7 with all of its utilities for eighty dollars less than the original price.