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LimeWire is planning to become legitimate by changing the method in which it offers audio files for its users.

The creator of this file-sharing program, Lime Wire LLC, announced its intentions to create a website where people could buy songs or albums from.
This music download service will consist of an online store, a stand-alone one at first, which will be accessible from links in LimeWire software.

In the future it will evolve and the users will have the possibility to browse and purchase songs directly from the program.
Tracks will have the MP3 file format and will be available also as part of a monthly subscription plan.

LimeWire is known as a peer-to-peer networking service, founded in 2000, and used by many people around the world.

In present, the illegitimate factor lead the company into a dispute with Recording Industry Association of America which wants LimeWire to be fined with 150,000 US dollars for every song downloaded using the file-sharing program.

On its way on becoming legitimate, Lime Wire LLC is signing up partners for the new project and the first two companies listed are Nettwerk Productions and IRIS Distribution, which will provide songs for the new service.

Jesse Rubenfeld, the Lime Wire Chief Financial Officer, declared: "We are delighted to collaborate with these forward-thinking music companies and sell their authorized content through LimeWire".

Activated Content Corp. from Seattle, a leader in the audio watermarking field, believes that file-sharing on the Internet might become legal.

The audio watermarking technology consists of digital manipulating a song in such a way that the person can’t hear the audio pattern that is detectable only by the right software.
"You can't hear it, so you don't know it's there," said Eric Silberstein, CEO of Activated Content.

The watermark is part of the audio is very difficult to be removed.
An example would be the ID3 metadata tags embedded by iTunes in songs.
Silberstein said that it could be cracked though but only with a Cray supercomputer in a month and a half.

Audio experts say that an audio watermark can even be rerecorded using an analog cassette deck with a low-fidelity microphone.

The popularity of this technology grew over copy protection and other DRM methods.

According to Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne LLC, an online media research firm, the bad aspects of using this technology are its high costs and the fact that that audio watermarking, while it has enabled record companies to gather evidences of consumers illegally file-sharing music, doesn't overcome the fundamental problem of the big and strong negative reaction that would be generated by suing pirating customers on a mass scale.

Many record companies are giving licenses for audio watermarking from Activated in trials and that allows customers to download unprotected music and movies that have the content and advertising tracked by audio watermarks.

Sony Music and Universal Music are listed among these kinds of companies as users of Activated and others are operating under nondisclosure agreements.

Eric Silberstein highlighted the fact that the tracking technology allows advertisers to collect information about the customers and the effectiveness of the ad.
This kind of data is very valuable so that advertisers are willing to pay 5 to 10 times rate of a regular as for an ad: "What content owners have been afraid would reduce their income is now an opportunity to increase their income".

Activated announced on Wednesday that it will license audio watermarks developed by Microsoft’s Research section.

Silberstein’s opinion is that this technology is the key because it creates simpler watermarks that can be decoded by MP3 players in smart phones too, besides PCs.
The phones that will be able to detect Activated watermarks will appear next year.

Activated earns from selling the software to record labels, broadcasters and advertisers, but also from charging per transaction.

An Internet Protocol address, widely known as "IP address" is, for most of us, a number that makes our computer an entity on the Internet or on a local network. What some people don't know is that this number can reveal a lot of information about us, like location, ISP name, and sometimes even phisical address, depending on the settings made by our ISP. As long as you want privacy and security on the Internet just like inside your own house, hiding your real IP address is an excellent choice, and one of the tools that can help you accomplish this task is Hide My IP 2007, a small and useful software application .


Setup

The last stable version of this program is 2.09, and was released about 3 months ago. The setup package is a little larger than 1MB, and installing it is a piece of cake, as you can see in the screenshots below...


Interface
Once you start the program, the window that you can see in the screenshot to the left appears. Until you'll decide to purchase the program, you have 3 days to try Hide My IP 2007, and during this period you'll miss some features of the full version. Most of the time, the main window of this program will stay hidden, because once you set the options, there's no need to keep the main window in sight.


Features

The main purpose of this program is really simple - to hide your IP, revealing a different one to sites or users that try to get this information. For example, after installing the program and choosing to hide my IP, different websites located me in USA, based on the IP assigned by the program, while my real location is a few thousand miles away...

While the full version can change your IP every 5 minutes, the trial one is limited to using a single one. Hide My IP is fully compatible with IE, Firefox, Opera and Netscape browsers, and the premium services can add even more to your online security. Other than the above, there's nothing much to say. This program really works, and it's so easy to use, that everybody should be able to use it, even without understanding much about all the technical mumbo-jumbo. Just check the screenshots and you'll understand it all!

The Good

Hide My IP 2007 does exactly what its name says, quick and easy. The full version allows you to use a single fake IP, which can be very useful for a lot of things, when an ever-changing IP can lead to unwanted results.

The Bad

I think that 29.95$ is simply too much for this program, especially as long as the premium service is available for an extra charge.

Conclusion

If you worry about exposing your identity on the Internet, Hide My IP 2007 is an excellent medicine that will help you sleep well at night. If the price will be lowered to a better one, this program can become the best choice for all of us, beginners or experts.

Developer: My Privacy Tools Inc
Price: 29.95$
Trial Link: Download

Text editing is a really simple task, and most people are happy using the tools built into their operating system, like Notepad or Wordpad, but we're not all the same... When you work on large articles, web pages or large scripts, those simple tools are not enough, since you need to use macros, edit multiple files at once and take advantage of advanced preview or syntax highlighting.

The features I just mentioned are available in more programs for every single computing platform out there, and in the Windows world there are probably hundreds of good text editors. Today's pick is one of the most popular ones, called EmEditor Professional.


Setup

The last stable version of this program is 6.00.4, and its setup package is as small as 2.2MB, including some useful plugins that you can choose to install or not during the setup process. The Web Preview and the Search plugins are "must have" ones, and the other can also prove very useful, so I can't advise you anything else than to check the Install plug-ins box. Below, you can check 3 screenshots taken during the install of the program, to ensure this is as easy as possible to get working, so let's move on and talk about the interface and features...


Interface
EmEditor Professional has an interface that's just like hot iron - you can bend it as you wish. All the toolbars can be moved around, resized, or simply hidden, while custom ones can also be added. As you can notice in the picture to the left, the default interface of this program looks just like a text editor should - easy to use, well organized, without useless tools and panels, but if you need more room for your data, then you can hide almost everything, as I was saying.


Features

Now, text editors should be able to create, edit and save text documents, right? The difference between simple ones and the professional tools is not their goal, but how easy you can accomplish that goal. Let's take HTML editing as an example. Basic text editors don't have syntax highlighting, you can't preview how your page is going to look in a browser inside them, and you can't use macro commands and snippets either, just to name the most important features.

Additional features include the ability to use bookmarks inside each of your text files, so instead of having 40 different files for a large project, you can have 40 bookmarks inside a big text file, to get quick access to any of the chapters of your work. As you can see from the screenshots above, this is only a glance, so feel free to take a closer look at EmEditor Professional, and prepare for version 7(an early Beta was available for download last week on the official site)!


The Good

This text editing tool is one of the few that got Vista certification so far, but this is not all. For its price, EmEditor Professional has an excellent combination of features, and using it should be really easy even for beginners.

The Bad

The ability to edit and save files from a remote location, like a FTP server, would be an excellent addition, while lowering the price just a little won't hurt the future buyers either...

Conclusion

While I still consider Ultra Edit to be the king of Windows text editing tools, EmEditor Professional seems to catch up, and probably it's only a matter of time until these two programs will have a battle head to head. Until then, there's nothing better to do than grab EmEditor's shareware version and give it a try, because it has more than enough to offer already!

Developer: EmuraSoft
Price: 39.99$
Trial Link: Download

On 14 August Microsoft delivered important security updates for Internet Explorer, XML Core Services, Vector Markup Language and Object Linking and Embedding automation, all included in Windows Vista, IE 7 and Office 2007 software.

The security bulletin of this month refers to Detection and Deployment Tools and Guidance, Affected Software and Download Locations, and Important and critical fixes.

Among the important-rated flows are the vulnerabilities in Windows Media Player that can allow remote code execution.
The users with administrative rights are more exposed then those with limited rights.

Another problem detected by the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, are the vulnerabilities in Windows Gadgets that can allow an anonymous remote attacker to run code with the privileges of the logged on user.
Again, users with administrative rights can be more affected if they subscribed to a malicious RSS feed in the Feed Headlines Gadget or added a malicious contacts file in the Contacts Gadget.

The last important vulnerability is in Virtual PC and Virtual Server which allows for elevation of privilege, meaning that it can allow a guest operating system user to run code on the host or another guest operating systems.

The six critical fixes are: vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services, vulnerability in OLE Automation, vulnerability in Microsoft Excel, cumulative security update for Internet Explorer, vulnerability in GDI, vulnerability in Vector Markup Language, vulnerability in Windows Media Player, vulnerabilities in Windows Gadgets, and vulnerability in Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

These critical flows allow for Remote code execution after a user views a crafted page using Internet Explorer, or a crafted file in Windows Media Player, or when the user opens a crafted page in Excel.