system

How many times have you been driving to work and thought "Did I remember to lock the front door?" Or who remembers coming home early from school and finding all the doors locked with nobody home? Thanks to a new system, people will never have to ... worry about forgetting to lock their doors or bringing their house keys with them again. All you need is an Internet connection or a mobile phone. The company behind the plan, Ingersoll-Rand (under the "Schlage Lock" brand name) has manufactured a system that allows locks to be opened and closed via Internet commands. Now, users can lock and unlock ... (view more)

Adapter Watch AdapterWatch displays useful information about your network adapters, including IP addresses, hardware address, WINS servers, DNS servers, MTU value, the number of bytes received or sent, current transfer speed, and more. In addition, ... it displays general TCP/IP/UDP/ICMP statistics for your local computer http://nirsoft.net Crucial System Scanner This handy program scans your computer for the type of RAM currently being used and how much memory has been installed. Although the makers of this tool intended for it to be used to so you can buy the right type of RAM in their brand, ... (view more)

After making intense efforts to re-secure the city's computer network after a disgruntled employee took control of the system, San Francisco officials have made a big mistake by putting around 150 passwords into the public record. The blunder comes ... as part of an ongoing criminal action against Terry Childs, a system administrator who, apparently infuriated by the work practices of his colleagues, put a series of passwords on the entire system to stop anyone else getting access. He then refused to hand over the details even under threat of imprisonment; after being placed on remand with bail ... (view more)

A new industry agreement could eventually mean an end to choosing between lower quality TV pictures and a house full of messy cabling. Major audio-visual manufacturers including Sony, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung, and Motorola have agreed to back an ... industry standard for wireless signals to carry high-definition video. Wireless Home Digital Interface will transmit on the 5GHz band, which means it doesn't need licensing. The system can carry up to 3bBits per second, which means it can cope with the top-end 1080p video format without having to compress the signal. It should also be able to transmit ... (view more)

Adobe has unveiled changes which will allow both Google and Yahoo to search content contained within Flash presentations. Flash is a system used to produce audio-visual content for websites, such as short movies and animations, in a way that looks ... the same on all machines. It usually involves much smaller file sizes than traditional video formats such as Windows Media. Designers can also incorporate interactive content in Flash such as games and quizzes. However, one major flaw for website owners has always been the fact that Flash content is searchable in the same way as regular website ... (view more)

Today's fresh software picks were provided courtesy of Bob Helmer at Shell Extension City. Please note that the below software descriptions are provided solely from the developer and are absent from any guarantee or warranty. You are encouraged to ... review the Shell Extension Software Policy for more details. Stick Stick is a Windows application that assigns tabs to utilities like folder explorers, web browsers and notepads. These tabs attach to the sides of your screen (called ScreenTabs). ScreenTabs are highly customizable tab-shaped windows that lets you access commonly used utilities ... (view more)

Google has unveiled a system that will make it easier for online advertisers to find websites that can help reach their target audience. 'Ad Planner' is currently in testing and only available to selected customers, but the plan is to eventually ... make it available to everyone free of charge. Google's new stud should be remarkably simple to use, as advertisers simply type in details of their target demographic and some examples of websites they already know appeal to that audience. The system then returns a list of the best matches, along with details of the overall audience for each site and ... (view more)

There are major changes in store for the way Internet addresses work; The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which runs the system used to 'translate' website addresses to the particular computer used to store each site's ... content, held its annual general meeting this week. It has backed plans to completely overhaul the top level domain system, which involves the letters that come after the final period in a site address. At the moment, the only letters which can be used are a two letter code for each country (such as .ca for Canada), or a few generic domains such as ... (view more)

A tech firm is using a form of human GPS to let users know which nightspots are the most lively. Sense Networks, a newly-launched New York company, has developed a database system titled Macrosense. It brings together both the details of phone users ... who've installed their software, and other details, like where taxis are heading. The idea is based on the way GPS systems analyse the speeds of thousands of different cars to build up a picture of which roads are particularly congested. They are trying out the technology with Citysense, a free feature for smart phones such as the BlackBerry and ... (view more)

A leaked internal report on a secret trial of eavesdropping and advertising technology from Internet Service Provuder (ISP) British Telecom (BT) reportedly shows that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, causing a small percentage ... of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance to believe they had been infected with adware. The January 2007 report (PDF), published by WikiLeaks shows what can happen when an ISP tampers with raw Internet traffic for its own profit. The leak was revealed weeks after Charter Communications told its users it would be testing similar ... (view more)