10 Must-Have Free Downloads.

Some downloadable software is so good that you just have to grab it. Unfortunately, often you have to pay for it after you try it out. But every once in a while, a must-have program is totally free. Such indispensable, no-cost programs are the hardest kind to find.
We've saved you the time it takes to dig up such gems. Read on to learn about ten must-have programs that can keep your PC fast, fun to use, and safe. Some of the creators ask for a small donation if you like the application, and some of these downloads are older, "lite" versions of more full-featured software--but all are free to download, and free to use.

System Cleanup and Maintenance
CCleaner, the best free/donationware program you can find for cleaning a system and keeping it in tip-top shape. It deletes temporary and unneeded files, erases your browsing tracks, kills unwanted cookies, and zaps unnecessary files associated with various programs, including all the popular browsers. It even provides a Registry cleaner.
CCEnhancer (free/donationware), which powers up CCleaner by increasing the long list of cleanable programs. It tidies up the traces of more applications than CCleaner can do alone, adding favorites such as Ashampoo Burning Studio, LogMeIn, Microsoft Works, and many others. It integrates directly into CCleaner, so you have nothing new to learn.
LookInMyPC can help. It peers into your computer and gives you an exceptionally detailed report, including the PC's manufacturer, its serial number, the amount of RAM, the hard-disk space, and similar hardware info. Overall it offers far more than most users want to know, though the amount of detail is perfect for geeks; if you dig into it, you can see the part number of your RAM chips, all your installed printer drivers, the name and address of your ISP, lists of installed updates and patches, and plenty more.
Secunia PSI scans your PC, finds all the installed software, alerts you about which programs need updates, and then helps you do the updating. It also warns you about which of your out-of-date programs represent a security risk, and it can even automatically update your programs after a little configuration.
Media Tools
IrfanView, a superb graphics viewer and basic image editor. It's fast, it's simple to use, and it's free/donationware--what else could you want? It views just about any image file type in existence, and does so with lightning speed. You can also use it to convert between file types, crop images, add effects, and perform other basic editing chores. It can show files as slideshows and play multimedia files, too.
Photoscape. That a piece of software this powerful is free/donationware is remarkable; you'll be amazed at how much functionality is built in. For a start, it offers a photo editor, a file viewer, a slideshow creator, a batch editor, and a screen-capture program. And each component is packed with features. For example, you can combine multiple photos into a single frame, and can even convert RAW-format photos--used by many digital cameras--into .jpg files.
Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free. Contrary to what some people may believe, CDs and DVDs are not a thing of the past, and this free program is ideal for anyone who needs to rip, burn, or copy such discs. (The current commercial version, the $50 Ashampoo Burning Studio 10, adds editing, menu creation, and other features.) With Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free, you can copy entire discs, burn movies to a CD/DVD/Blu-ray Disc, create Video CDs, create .iso images from a CD or DVD, create a CD or DVD from an .iso image, and a lot more. Despite all those capabilities, the program is exceedingly easy to use.
Productivity Boosters
ClipX. This venerable clipboard enhancer powers up the anemic Windows Clipboard, keeping the last 25 Clipboard clips so that you can reuse them. It stores graphics as well as text, takes up barely any RAM, and is exceptionally easy to use. It also accepts plug-ins. Make sure to get the developer's own ClipX Stickies Plugin, which stores clips you frequently access--such as boilerplate text or corporate logos--so that you can pop them into any application. Note: ClipX isn't officially supported on Windows 7, but it worked fine on my Windows 7 test PC.
Hamster Free Zip Archiver. With this tool you can create and open archives with drag-and-drop ease. It handles all the popular compression formats--including .zip, .rar, and .7z--and gives you a host of useful capabilities, such as changing compression levels and splitting files.
Evernote. It's perfect for anyone who suffers from information overload and needs a way to store data of any kind and then find it quickly. The program captures information from the Web, e-mail, and even digital cameras, scanners, and microphones. You can manually enter notes yourself, too. You categorize the information, tag it, and annotate it so that it's easy to find and use. Since Evernote syncs the information to the Web and mobile devices, you have it wherever you go. I use this tool to research and write books and articles, plan vacations, and more. You'll likely find plenty of uses for it as well.

Hundreds killed in tsunami after 8.9 Japan quake.

TOKYO – A ferocious tsunami spawned by one of the largest earthquakes on record slammed Japan's eastern coast Friday, killing hundreds of people as it swept away ships, cars and homes while widespread fires burned out of control.
Hours later, the tsunami hit Hawaii but did not cause major damage. Warnings blanketed the Pacific, putting areas on alert as far away as South America, Canada, Alaska and the entire U.S. West coast. In northeastern Japan, the area around a nuclear power plant was evacuated after the reactor's cooling system failed.
Police said 200 to 300 bodies were found in the northeastern coastal city of Sendai, the city in Miyagi prefecture, or state, closest to the epicenter. Another 137 were confirmed killed, with 531 people missing. Police also said 627 people were injured.
The magnitude-8.9 offshore quake unleashed a 23-foot (seven-meter) tsunami and was followed for hours by more than 50 aftershocks, many of them of more than magnitude 6.0.
Dozens of cities and villages along a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) stretch of coastline were shaken by violent tremors that reached as far away as Tokyo, hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the epicenter. A large section of Kesennuma, a town of 70,000 people in Miyagi, burned furiously into the night with no apparent hope of being extinguished, public broadcaster NHK said.
"The earthquake has caused major damage in broad areas in northern Japan," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said at a news conference.
The quake was nearly 8,000 times stronger than one that struck New Zealand late last month, devastating the city of Christchurch.
"The energy radiated by this quake is nearly equal to one month's worth of energy consumption" in the United States, U.S. Geological Survey Scientist Brian Atwater told The Associated Press.
The government ordered thousands of residents near a nuclear power plant in the city of Onahama to move back at least two miles (three kilometers) from the plant. The reactor was not leaking radiation but its core remained hot even after a shutdown. The plant is 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.
Trouble was reported at two other nuclear plants as well, but there was no radiation leak at either of them.
Japan's coast guard said it was searching for 80 dock workers on a ship that was swept away from a shipyard in Miyagi.
Even for a country used to earthquakes, this one was of horrific proportions because of the tsunami that crashed ashore, swallowing everything in its path as it surged several miles (kilometers) inland before retreating. The apocalyptic images on Japanese TV of powerful, debris-filled waves, uncontrolled fires and a ship caught in a massive whirlpool resembled scenes from a Hollywood disaster movie.
Large fishing boats and other vessels rode high waves ashore, slamming against overpasses or scraping under them and snapping power lines along the way. Upturned and partially submerged cars bobbed in the water. Ships anchored in ports crashed against each other.
The tsunami roared over embankments, washing anything in its path inland before reversing directions and carrying the cars, homes and other debris out to sea. Flames shot from some of the homes, probably because of burst gas pipes.
Waves of muddy waters flowed over farmland near Sendai, carrying buildings, some of them ablaze. Drivers attempted to flee. Sendai airport was inundated with thick, muddy debris that included cars, trucks, buses and even light planes.
Highways to the worst-hit coastal areas buckled. Telephone lines snapped. Train service in northeastern Japan and in Tokyo, which normally serve 10 million people a day, were suspended, leaving untold numbers stranded in stations or roaming the streets. Tokyo's Narita airport was closed indefinitely.
President Barack Obama said the U.S. "stands ready to help" Japan.
Jesse Johnson, a native of the U.S. state of Nevada who lives in Chiba, north of Tokyo, was eating at a sushi restaurant with his wife when the quake hit.
"At first it didn't feel unusual, but then it went on and on. So I got myself and my wife under the table," he told The Associated Press. "I've lived in Japan for 10 years, and I've never felt anything like this before. The aftershocks keep coming. It's gotten to the point where I don't know whether it's me shaking or an earthquake."
NHK said more than 4 million buildings were without power in Tokyo and its suburbs.
As night fell, Tokyo's streets were jammed with cars, buses and trucks trying to get around and out of the city. Pedestrians swarmed the sidewalks to walk home, or at least find a warm place to spend the night as the temperatures dropped.
Tomoko Suzuki and her elderly mother stood on a crowded downtown corner, unable to get to their 29th-floor condominium because the elevator wasn't working. They unsuccessfully tried to hail a taxi to a relative's house and couldn't find a hotel room.
"We are so cold," said Suzuki. "We really don't know what to do."
A large fire erupted at the Cosmo oil refinery in the city of Ichihara and burned out of control with 100-foot (30-meter) flames whipping into the sky.
"Our initial assessment indicates that there has already been enormous damage," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. "We will make maximum relief effort based on that assessment."
He said the Defense Ministry was sending troops to the hardest-hit region. A utility aircraft and several helicopters were on the way.
Also in Miyagi prefecture, a fire broke out in a turbine building of a nuclear power plant, but it was later extinguished, said Tohoku Electric Power Co.
A reactor area of a nearby plant was leaking water, the company said. But it was unclear if the leak was caused by the tsunami or something else. There were no reports of radioactive leaks at any of Japan's nuclear plants.
Jefferies International Ltd., a global investment banking group, estimated overall losses of about $10 billion.
Hiroshi Sato, a disaster management official in northern Iwate prefecture, said officials were having trouble getting an overall picture of the destruction.
"We don't even know the extent of damage. Roads were badly damaged and cut off as tsunami washed away debris, cars and many other things," he said.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 2:46 p.m. quake was magnitude 8.9, the biggest to hit Japan since record-keeping began in the late 1800s and one of the biggest ever recorded in the world.
The quake struck at a depth of six miles (10 kilometers), about 80 miles (125 kilometers) off the eastern coast, the agency said. The area is 240 miles (380 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. Several quakes hit the same region in recent days, including one measured at magnitude 7.3 on Wednesday that caused no damage.
A tsunami warning was extended to a number of areas in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and Latin America, including Japan, Russia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Chile. In the Philippines, authorities ordered an evacuation of coastal communities, but no unusual waves were reported.
Thousands fled homes in Indonesia after officials warned of a tsunami up to 6 feet (2 meters) high, but waves of only 4 inches (10 centimeters) were measured. No big waves came to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, either.
The first waves hit Hawaii about 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT). A tsunami about 7 feet (2.1 meters) high was recorded on Maui and a wave at least 3 feet (a meter) high was recorded on Oahu and Kauai. Officials warned that the waves would continue and could get larger.
Japan's worst previous quake was a magnitude 8.3 temblor in 1923 in Kanto that killed 143,000 people, according to USGS. A 7.2-magnitude quake in Kobe in 1996 killed 6,400 people.
Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire" — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 percent of the world's quakes occur, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 nations. A magnitude-8.8 temblor that shook central Chile in February 2010 also generated a tsunami and killed 524 people.

Computer expert says US behind Stuxnet worm.

LONG BEACH, California (AFP) – A German computer security expert said Thursday he believes the United States and Israel's Mossad unleashed the malicious Stuxnet worm on Iran's nuclear program.
"My opinion is that the Mossad is involved," Ralph Langner said while discussing his in-depth Stuxnet analysis at a prestigious TED conference in the Southern California city of Long Beach.
"But, the leading source is not Israel... There is only one leading source, and that is the United States."
There has been widespread speculation Israel was behind the Stuxnet worm that has attacked computers in Iran, and Tehran has blamed the Jewish state and the United States for the killing of two nuclear scientists in November and January.
"The idea behind Stuxnet computer worm is really quite simple," Langner said. "We don't want Iran to get the bomb."
The malicious code was crafted to stealthily take control of valves and rotors at an Iranian nuclear plant, according to Langner.
"It was engineered by people who obviously had inside information," he explained. "They probably also knew the shoe size of the operator."
Stuxnet targets computer control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens and commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other critical infrastructure.
"The idea here is to circumvent digital data systems, so the human operator could not get there fast enough," Langner said.
"When digital safety systems are compromised, really bad things can happen -- your plant can blow up.
Most Stuxnet infections have been discovered in Iran, giving rise to speculation it was intended to sabotage nuclear facilities there. The worm was crafted to recognize the system it was to attack.
The New York Times reported in January that US and Israeli intelligence services collaborated to develop the computer worm to sabotage Iran's efforts to make a nuclear bomb.
Russia called on NATO in January to launch an investigation into the computer worm that targeted a Russian-built Iranian nuclear power plant, saying the incident could have triggered a new Chernobyl.
Russia's envoy to NATO in January said Stuxnet caused centrifuges producing enriched uranium at the Bushehr plant to spin out of control, which could have sparked a new "Chernobyl tragedy," the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Ukraine.
"The operators saw on their screens that the centrifuges were working normally when in fact they were out of control," Dmitry Rogozin told reporters after meeting with ambassadors from the 28-nation Western alliance.
Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr for civilian use.
Langner said the Stuxnet code was designed to trick human operators by showing them recorded readings indicating machinery is running normally while behind the scenes they are heading for destruction.
"It's definitely hard-core sabotage," Langner said of Stuxnet. "It's like in the movies where during a heist the security camera is running pre-recorded video showing nothing is wrong."
Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency has denied that the Stuxnet attack effected the country's nuclear program, including Bushehr.
A terrifying aspect of Stuxnet, according to Langner, is that it is a generic attack that would work well in factories, power plants, or other operations plentiful in the United States.
"It's a cyber weapon of mass destruction," Langner said. "We'd better start preparing right now."
StuxNet Worm

Republican Lawmaker Promises New Online Privacy Legislation.

A senior Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives will soon introduce legislation designed to give Web users more control of their personal data and to give the U.S. Federal Trade Commission power to enforce voluntary privacy standards developed with Internet companies, he said Friday.
Representative Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican and senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he plans to introduce online privacy legislation soon. The bill's focus will be on allowing Web users to know what personal information Internet companies are collecting about them and to control how it's used, said Stearns, co-author of past online privacy bills.
The bill would encourage Web-based companies to develop industry standards for privacy but would give the FTC some enforcement power, Stearns said during a speech at a Technology Policy Institute (TPI) forum on privacy.
Finding the right balance between privacy and online commerce is a "tough issue," but consumers are demanding more privacy protections. "We are at a tipping point where we have to come to grips with the information that's being collected," he said.
Still, Stearns suggested that online advertising could be hurt if regulations go too far. Online tracking to deliver behavioral, or targeted, ads is a legitimate practice if companies notify consumers what information is collected and allow them to turn off the collection, he said.
"Online advertising ... supports much of the commercial content, applications and services that are available today," he said. "We do not want to disrupt a well-established and successful business model."
Stearns' approach to online privacy would likely be different from a bill introduced in February by Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat. Speier's bill would direct the FTC to create standards for a nationwide do-not-track mechanism that would allow Web users to opt out of online tracking and the sharing of consumer data among online businesses.
The FTC, in a report released in December, called for the technology industry to create more do-not-track tools. Mozilla, Microsoft and Google all announced do-not-track features for their browsers shortly after the FTC report.
The U.S. Department of Commerce called for a privacy bill of rights for Web users in its own December privacy paper.
But William Kovacic, a Republican commissioner at the FTC, questioned what agencies would enforce new privacy standards and whether lawmakers and privacy advocates would stop pushing for more privacy protections if Internet companies met current demands. "Do you believe the promises of the regulators and others that if you do X, they will be satisfied?" he said at the TPI event. "Or is X a revise-and-resubmit process ... in which you never ultimately satisfy the referees?"
The FTC and Commerce reports, as well as some legislative proposals on online privacy, are "very fuzzy" on details on whether there should be strong regulations or voluntary compliance with industry privacy standards, he added.
Before new privacy regulations are created, lawmakers should look at the potential impact on Internet commerce, added Thomas Lenard, president at TPI, an antiregulation think tank. "More privacy generally means less information available" on the Internet, he said.
But Daniel Weitzner, associate administrator at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), disagreed, saying recent studies suggest that Internet-based companies that give users more control over their personal data can build loyalty and advertising click-through rates at the same time. Giving consumers greater control over their privacy doesn't necessarily mean that online companies will lose access to all that data, he said.
"We really see no evidence that there's some trade-off" between privacy and e-commerce, Weitzner said.
 Privacy Law

Intel Hopes to Boost Cloud Gaming With Ray Tracing.

A new technology from Intel called ray tracing could bring lifelike images and improved 3D effects to games on tablets and other mobile devices.
The chip maker is creating chips and rewriting games to use ray tracing, which generates accurate images by tracing paths of light and could lead to console-like gaming via the cloud, the company said in a podcast this week.
At some point in the future, after a new Intel chip is released, mobile device users will be able to play complex 3D games over the cloud using real-time ray tracing, which demands a lot of computing power, Intel said. Clusters of power servers with multiple CPUs and vector processing units could process tasks in parallel, with accurate images then being delivered to tablets and smartphones.
Tablets and smartphones are mostly used for casual gaming, but increasingly sophisticated hardware is making the devices capable of handling higher-resolution graphics. Apple's iPad 2 tablet, which was announced this week, has improved graphics capabilities compared to its predecessor, while LG's Optimus 2X smartphone can render 1080p video. A tablet using Nvidia's upcoming mobile chip called Kal-El was demonstrated playing an Xbox 360 game at last month's Mobile World Congress show.
Intel has rewritten the first-person shooter game "Wolfenstein," which looks more realistic with ray-tracing technology, said Daniel Pohl, an Intel researcher, in the podcast.
"We have a red car sitting at a courtyard, which has a very shiny reflective surface. That can be rendered very good ... because ray tracing can do very physically [accurate] modeling of reflections," Pohl said.
For example, ray tracing will let gamers use reflections off the car's surface as a mirror to see if snipers are approaching from the rear, Pohl said. Ray tracing could also add more visual detail such as shadows, which could help enhance 3D effects in a game.
Modern device screens employ millions of pixels and millions of rays are sent out for every pixel, which creates a challenge as a lot of processing power is needed, said John Owens, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California at Davis, during the podcast.
Billions of rays may need to be continually bounced off objects to accurately sample the changing scenes in a game. Modeling becomes even more complex if a game has a lot of moving objects and changing scenes.
"The reason [ray tracing] isn't pursued in your normal graphics cards today or that most of your games aren't done through it is that actually doing that computation is very challenging," Owens said.
Intel is trying to address the challenge through an experimental server chip called Knights Ferry, which is based on the company's new MIC (many integrated core) architecture. The chip, which was announced in May at the International Supercomputing Conference, is designed for intensive graphics and high-performance computing.
The chip has 32 x86 cores with corresponding 512-bit vector processing units. The cores operate at a clock speed of 1.2GHz, and the chip supports OpenCL and Microsoft's DirectX, which are frameworks that include tools for parallel programming.
Knights Ferry also implements elements of the now defunct Larrabee chip, which was to be Intel's first graphics processor. The chip maker showed Larrabee's ray-tracing capabilities on-stage at the Intel Developer Forum in 2009 in a game titled "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars," but many audience members were underwhelmed by the limited scope of the demonstration.
The first commercial product based on MIC architecture will be a chip called Knights Corner, which the company said will include more than 50 cores. Intel will release the chip in the first half of next year, an Intel executive said on a podcast in late February. Use of ray tracing for mobile gaming hinges on that chip's release.
Cloud Gaming 

Roger Ebert’s Inspiring Digital Transformation.

With the help of his wife, two colleagues and the Alex-equipped MacBook that he uses to generate his computerized voice, famed film critic Roger Ebert delivered the final talk at the TED conference on Friday in Long Beach, California.
Prefacing his remarks with a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ebert opened by telling the audience that he “became operational on June 18, 1942. [And] like HAL 9000, I also speak with a computerized voice” -- the same remarkably realistic computerized voice he shared with the world on Oprah last year.
From there, Ebert and friends took the audience on his inspiring journey, from the near-death experience in 2006 that left him without a voice to his search for the technology that creates Ebert-sounding text-to-speech to his present-day prolific use of social media for sharing his commentary on both movies and life with the world.
Ebert credited a life-long love affair with technology for giving him the inspiration to both find his “voice” and continue his career on the Internet. “I joined Compuserve when it had fewer users than I have followers on Twitter,” he joked.
“For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence... [if this had happened before], I’d be isolated as a hermit; I’d be trapped inside my head. Because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not have to scream.”

That's not to say Ebert's existence is not without significant physical and social struggle. In one of the more moving moments of his talk, Ebert's wife Chaz choked up while reading his words aloud, saying, "People talk loudly and slowly to me... sometimes they assume I am deaf. There are people that don’t want to make eye contact. It is human nature to look away from illness; we don’t enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality... that’s why writing on the Internet has been a life saver for me."
Meanwhile, the technology that enables Ebert to “speak” continues to see improvements -- for example, adding more realistic inflection for question marks and exclamation points. In a test of that, which Ebert called the “Ebert test” for computerized voices, the critic closed by telling the audience a joke, saying, "If the computer can successfully tell a joke as well as Henry Youngman, then that’s the voice I want.”
Judging by the laughter, tears and standing ovation from the crowd that followed as Ebert left the stage, it would seem that voice may have already arrived.
Read More. 

South Korean websites come under further attack.

SEOUL, South Korea – Unidentified attackers targeted more than two dozen South Korean government and private websites Saturday, a day after two waves of similar attacks, but officials reported no serious damage.
A total of 29 websites were hit Saturday in so-called "denial of service" attacks, in which large numbers of "zombie" computers try to connect to a site at the same time in an attempt to overwhelm the server, the Korea Communications Commission said.
Commission official Lee Sang-kug said the attacks were "so weak that no actual damage was detected so far." Lee said the commission would keep a close watch on the situation in coming days, but that the fallout was likely to remain limited because the government and computer security companies were well prepared.
Saturday's attacks on sites including South Korea's presidential office, the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, some financial institutions and U.S. Forces Korea followed two rounds Friday in which damage was also limited.
Lee said that 40 websites were originally targeted Friday, though only 29 came under actual attack. A total of 29 were targeted Saturday, he said.
The National Police Agency said the attacks originated from 30 servers in 18 foreign countries or territories including the United States, Israel, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, India, Brazil and Iran.
"We may find more servers behind this attack as it is only the beginning of the investigation," said Jung Suk-hwa, head of the agency's Cyber Terror Response Center. "Generally, there is someone else who controls all of these servers and we are working to figure out who it is."
In 2009, some government websites in South Korea and the U.S. were paralyzed by a similar type of attack that South Korean officials believed was conducted by North Korea. But U.S. officials have largely ruled out North Korea as the origin, according to cybersecurity experts.
South Korean media have previously reported that North Korea runs an Internet warfare unit aimed at hacking into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather information and disrupt service.
Park Kun-woo, a spokesman for South Korean computer security company AhnLab, said Friday that China is also pointed to as a source of cyberattacks because a large amount of malware, or malicious software, originates from there.
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