Brandon Dimmel

Hackers could soon be listening to your cellphone call. That's the word from the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, an annual get-together for hackers. Cryptographers at the conference say they've been able to crack a code that, on a normal ... day, prevents the interception of mobile phone calls by forcing those phones to consistently change frequencies across a list of about eighty channels. Since those not working for a cellphone company would have an almost impossible time knowing the sequence of this frequency change-up, hackers usually have no way of intercepting more than a few ... (view more)

Tooler Tooler is a unique program that allows you to create special types of shortcuts. Using Tooler you can you can move, rename, or change icons, in addition to tasks like turning off the monitor, restarting your PC or ejecting the CD-ROM tray. ... http://www.english.aionel.net ZoomIt ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. http://www.technet.microsoft. ... (view more)

Here's a piece of advice for thieves this holiday season: if you steal a game console, don't go online to play games with your crooked friends. Doing just that helped cops find a stolen Xbox 360 over the weekend. Twenty-two-year-old Jeremiah Gilliam ... is facing huge larceny charges this morning after cops found a veritable pile of stolen electronics in his Bronx home. According to police, Gilliam had an incredible collection of global positioning systems (GPS), video game consoles, laptop computers, cellphones and other electronic devices in his home. Usually these kinds of repeated petty ... (view more)

Waterloo-based Research In Motion's (RIM's) is receiving plenty of flak from its users after a second outage in less than a week. The outage left users of the popular handheld without service from Tuesday evening until the following morning. "One ... outage is bad enough, but when potential customers hear of two in one week, they get very nervous," said one poster on the Crackberry blog, a forum that keeps users of the handheld in touch with one another and updated on recent events related to the device. (Source: informationweek.com ) Most concerning of all the negative sentiments were threats by ... (view more)

Skeys Remap buttons on your keyboard with Skeys. For example, you can remap your email button or volume control and make good use of the buttons do perform another task (or launch another program). http://freewarewire.blogspot.com Chrome Plus ... ChromePlus has all the functionalities that the Google Chrome browser has, but offers more functionality, including: Mouse gesture, Super drag, IE tab, and more. http://www.chromeplus.org Today's fresh software picks were provided courtesy of Bob Helmer at Shell Extension City, in partnership with Infopackets.com. Please note that the below software ... (view more)

The popularity of Blu-ray players appears to be rising, just a year after doubters predicted that the devices -- which launched three years ago for $800-$1,000 each -- would fade into oblivion because of their marginal improvement over standard DVD ... players. Much of that negative thinking has changed, and as you might expect, it has a lot to do with the plummeting cost of buying a Blu-ray player. Blu-ray Price Drop One of Many in Tech Market When the devices first launched three years ago, many cost nearly $1,000 -- a lot of money for most U.S. families, even in a pre-recession North America. ... (view more)

Rainbow Folders Rainbow Folders is a unique application that allows you to change the color of any icon representing any folder. This can help improve your ability to organize data while adding some visual flair to a boring desktop. ... http://www.rainbowfolders.aionel.net V-Grep V-Grep (Visual Grep) is an easy to use, feature-rich application that brings a well known program from the Unix world ("grep") to MS Windows. Featuring "regular expressions" (regex), vgrep is a powerful tool that allows the user to search and extract specific text in all files. This is an extremely ... (view more)

The BlackBerry is one of the most popular handheld devices in the world today because it offers instant and reliable access to email, instant messaging and of course voice communication. Unfortunately, none of these lovely features were available ... during a recent outage -- the second of its kind in the past week. Let's face it -- there isn't much advantage to having instant access to your friends, family, and colleagues when the handheld network you use is out of service. That was the case on Tuesday night, when for the second time in less than a week the BlackBerry service went out of service ... (view more)

Think you can multitask while driving? Think again. According to a recent report, drivers who use their cell phones to text while behind the wheel are six times more likely to crash their rides. "When people talk on the phone while driving they are ... four times more likely to get into an accident," says University of Utah psychologist Frank Drews. And thanks to Drews' last study, we now know texting behind the wheel means you're actually six times more likely to crash. (Source: com.au ) Studies Push Legislators to Act Talking on your cell phone while operating a vehicle has become illegal in ... (view more)

Microsoft has lost another appeal to keep Microsoft Word 2007 on store shelves in its current form. An appeals court on Tuesday found that the company had infringed on Canadian firm i4i's patent for a built-in XML editor. Microsoft and i4i aroused ... much attention back over the summer , when a U.S. District Court judge in Eastern Texas found that the Redmond-based software giant had infringed on the much smaller Toronto company's patent for an XML editor that is a critical part of the Office program Word. Rather than immediately set about changing the program to avoid the patent conflict, ... (view more)