Technology and Body

How to See If Your VPN Is Leaking Your IP Address (and How to Stop It) VPNs are great for security, but one of the big reasons many people use one is to mask or change their IP address. This lets you get around location-based restrictions on content, or check if your provider is throttling your connection. Unfortunately, a new security flaw can reveal your real IP address to prying eyes, even if you're using a VPN, and it's easy to exploit. Here's how it works, and what you can do about it. What's All This Now? Is My Data At Risk? Let's back up a bit. A Virtual Private Network, or a VPN, is great for encrypting your data and boosting security, but it's also useful to obscure your IP address. Your IP address is assigned to your internet connection by your service provider, and it can reveal who your service provider is and (in general) where you're located. If you've ever visited YouTube and seen "Sorry, this video isn't av...

The Best Music Player Application for Windows There are a lot of great music players for Windows, and it's next to impossible to make a broad "best" statement that applies to everyone. But that doesn't stop the powerful, lightweight, and customizable MusicBee from winning our hearts for the best music player on Windows. Our former favorite, Winamp, has shut down-but that isn't why we've changed our minds on this one. "Dead" apps are still worth using if they're the best-we've just decided, after lots of testing and deliberation, that Winamp is no longer the best music player in our minds. You'll still find Winamp in the competition section at the bottom, as well as in our list of the five best desktop music players. Note also that, while MusicBee is taking the place of "best music player" for this app directory, we know that a lot of you are fiercely loyal to your favorite music player, and with good reason-the...

Top 10 Underhyped Windows Apps Some apps are essential, and everyone who's anyone knows to have them on their computer. Some apps, however, are fantastic, yet fly under the radar. Today, we look at our top 10 underhyped apps on Windows. 10. WizMouse WizMouse is that app you never knew you wanted until you use it. It allows you to scroll in windows when you mouse over them, not just after you click on them—something OS X and Linux have built-in, but Windows is seemingly missing. It may seem trivial, but after using it for awhile, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. It'll even enable the mouse wheel in applications that don't support it, or even reverse the direction for the "natural" scrolling some people prefer. Check out our original post on it for more. 9. Skitch Skitch isn't necessarily the best screenshot tool around, but it's long been our favorite screenshot annotation tool for the Mac, and now it'...

Mac How to Run Mac OS X Inside Windows Using VirtualBox Whitson Gordon , Gawker Media Aug 28, 2012, 08.30 PM IST Even if you're a Windows fan, you've probably thought about trying OS X. Maybe you'd like to test drive OS X before switching to a Mac or building a Hackintosh, or maybe you just want to run that one killer OS X app on your Windows machine. Whatever your reason, you can actually install and run OS X on any Intel-based Windows PC with a program called VirtualBox. Here's how. Running OS X on your Windows desktop will take a bit of work, but it's pretty easy to do and the final product is awesome. To see what the whole setup will look like when you're done, check out the video above. Then, head to the instructions below to set it up for yourself. Thanks to MacBreaker for figuring out a lot of the original instructions! What You'll Need Before you start the installation process, you'll want to gather the following: A...

Most Popular File Encryption Tool: VeraCrypt Encrypting your sensitive data is important, but not all encryption tools are the same. VeraCrypt , the spiritual (and in many ways, including its code, actual) descendant of TrueCrypt, took the top spot by a wide margin, bringing home close to 41% of the overall vote. It's free, (mostly) open source, cross-platform, offers strong encryption, and offers all of the great features TrueCrypt did before its developers abandoned it. Second place with 20% of the overall vote was 7-Zip , a file compression tool that also has the ability to create encrypted archives. It's also free and cross-platform, and easy to use. Third place with close to 16% of the vote went to GNU Privacy Guard -more a platform than a product, but one with tons of individual tools that support its preferred encryption method, PGP. In fourth place with over 15% of the votes cast was Microsoft's BitLocker , built in to and already available i...

Download of the day: System Explorer Our daily pick of the best Windows software Why you need it Windows 8 vastly improved the default Windows Task Manager, but if you want an even more powerful tool - or don't own a copy of Windows 8 - then System Explorer is a superb free option. Virtually every feature of System Explorer is designed to make managing your open processes as easy as possible, while simultaneously placing some powerful tools at your fingertips. The tabbed interface, for instance, is divided into Tasks, Processes, Performance, History, Networking and Autoruns, thereby making it simple to isolate the issues and information you need to find. System Explorer can help in other ways; for example, glancing at a list of open processes isn't much help if you don't recognise the process name or know if it's safe. The program solves this by allowing you to check the process against its online database of potential threats, quickly letting yo...

5 quirky technologies that want to change the way we use computers The crazy tech that could replace your mouse and keyboard When it comes to input devices for our computers, not a lot has changed in the last two decades. Keyboards were around well before computers even existed, and the first mouse was invented way back in 1946. Meanwhile, track pads have been a part of mobile computing since the Apple PowerBook 500 was first introduced in 1994. Gaming has paved the way for a variety of interesting input devices, such as the Razer Hydra motion sensing controller, and Valve is trying to develop a controller that's actually optimized for PC gaming for use with Steam Machines . However, in the age of virtual reality, wearable sensors and motion tracking, we're poised for even more exciting ways to use our computers in the very near future. Below you'll find five technologies that are still in the early stages yet are poised to change the way we use co...