Google has long been one of the most useful tools on the Net, but frequent search engine users may find that they can make it even more efficient. CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that adds options to an ordinary Google search, providing additional links to sources such as Yahoo, Wikipedia, or MSN. Depending on the specifics of the search, results might also include links to movie, music, or book search engines.

It’s hard not to like the link to the Wayback Machine, which enables users to see pages that have vanished from the Net. The software filters out advertisements, numbers your results, and can block specific domains and sites if needed. It can also block GoogleAds, make your Google searching anonymous, and force Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar to load in secure (HTTPS) pages.

As privacy concerns grow more prominent in the public consciousness, and the desire to control all aspects of your browsing environment increases, the abilities that CustomizeGoogle confers on its users are quickly moving from “useful” to “must-have.”

Everything is a small software application that bypasses Windows search with a lightning quick interface and real-time results. It hits all of the files and folders in your local hard drive, or you can specify any subsection of it. The software doesn’t do much more than search, but its efficiency, effectiveness, stability, and low system resource usage make it a keeper utility.

The software is split into two main controls: the search box and the results page. When you first run Everything, it will create an index of all the files and folders on your machine. Unless you have millions of files, the index will be created before you know it. Searching is done in real time, as you type–i.e. the search term “rad” returns 379 objects, “radio” returns 160, and “radiohead” returns 71, all instantly.

The results screen can display seven different fields: Name, Path, Size, Last Write Time, Creation Time, Last Access Time, and Attributes. Sorting by any field takes a little longer than searching, but only slows down noticeably when you sort more than 1,000 results.

Everything also lets users connect to HTTP, FTP, or ETP (Everything Transfer Protocol) servers to allow remote searches, but its functionality is mostly singular–searching your local PC very quickly with minimal resources, and it accomplishes that well. If you’ve never struggled with Windows search before, you might pass Everything by. If your computer is a disorganized mess with files all over the place, Everything might be a wonderful gift.

Last.fm is a top-notch music player plug-in for music discovery, sharing, and tracking. Compatible with iTunes, MediaMonkey, Winamp, and many other players, and available for Windows, Mac, and the iPhone, it “scrobbles” your music when you play it, keeping track of what you’re listening to. Once you’ve created an account, you can set your musical likes, favorite bands, and tag tracks as it plays them back to you. The tagging option is customizable, so you can create your own tags on the fly or use the same ones that other users have chosen. When you stream music from Last.fm, it chooses what songs to play for you based on your scrobbling history and your favorite genres.

There’s also an iPhone app that’s loaded with features, tabs, and buttons–one of the most in-depth and dynamic iPhone streaming-music apps. Streaming-audio performance in this version has noticeably improved since the application’s original release. During testing in both Wi-Fi and 3G modes, buffer delays between songs took no more than 1 or 2 seconds, which is comparable to similar applications.

The app’s menus and Now Playing screen have also been overhauled for a much more attractive and easier-to-use experience. Few applications can match Last.fm’s combination of crisp-looking album art, local concert information, iTunes links, and artist biographies, which also come through on the desktop version. Whether you’re new to Last.fm or a habitual user, Last.fm is a recommended download for anyone seriously interested in discovering new music.

Editors’ note: Last.fm is owned by CNET’s parent company, CBS Interactive.

UPDATED: Corrected Opera’s country of origin.

E-mail and RSS feed improvements top the list of changes for Opera 9.60, moved out of beta today for Windows and Mac. As noted when the 9.60 beta came out last month, this version of the free browser offers up a multifaceted ”low-bandwidth mode” for Opera Mail and tweaks to the RSS reader.

Updates to Opera Link let users synchronize even more settings.

(Credit: Opera)

The feed preview rolls into Opera’s RSS management a standalone RSS app feature so that users can preview feeds before subscribing to them. The low bandwidth option for Opera Mail, also called M2, does different things for different kinds of accounts. Accessible under the Mail option on the Menubar, POP users will see messages truncated to the first 100 lines of a message, while IMAP users will find that it restricts downloads only to new messages. Both strip out attachment downloads unless otherwise specified.

Both accounts will also benefit from the new Follow/Ignore option. Ignore sets a contact’s e-mail to never download, and Follow does the opposite, always downloading messages from a specific contact. Ignored contacts’ messages are not deleted, just left on your server. Users are expected to manage their own account size limits, though.

Further improvements have also been made to Opera Link, the browser’s synchronization service. It now supports synchronizing typed history and custom search engine preferences. This means that if you’ve typed something into the search or location bar, you can now sync it to any computer that you’re using.

The full changelog can be read here.

Setting the iPhone to emergency call mode allows someone to see incoming text messages even if the passcode lock is turned on.

(Credit: Karl Kraft)

A 12-year-old who uses his iPhone mostly for texting with his girlfriend has discovered what looks like a new vulnerability with the device.

The unnamed boy, son of blogger Karl Kraft, turns on the passcode lock and disables SMS Preview in order to prevent his parents from seeing any messages, Kraft wrote on his blog.

Those settings block the display of incoming text messages and show an alert saying “New Text Message” if an SMS comes through while the phone is locked. However, if the phone is set to emergency call mode the incoming text messages are previewed.

“Thus all I need to do to intercept the messages from his girlfriend is to place the phone in emergency mode and wait 30 seconds for the next sickly sweet message,” Kraft writes.

Apple representatives did not return e-mails seeking comment.

A different security hole related to password-protected iPhones was discovered in August, and last month a researcher disclosed that the iPhone captures all the activities of a user in order to enable the cool fading applications effect.

If you’re thinking of switching to free antivirus protection, or are looking for a different program to try, AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is a rock-solid choice. Incidentally, it’s also the most-downloaded security application on CNET Download.com.

Yet, it’s not enough to follow the crowd. What if you dislike the interface? Or decide that the free edition doesn’t give you as comprehensive a protection package as you’d like? These things happen, you know.

Hence this slide show, which attempts to take the guesswork out of scouting for a new application or starting up AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 for the first time. It will walk you through installation tips and the feature set to help new users get started with AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, and to give security-seekers a sense of what to expect from the application.

See also:

First Look video: AVG Free Edition 8.0

First Look video: Avira Antivir 8.0

Security Starter Kit

All antivirus downloads

As expected, Mozilla Labs released a Firefox plug-in Tuesday called Geode that lets Web sites figure out a person’s approximate geographic location and use it in online services–as long as you grant the software permission to access the information.

Geode, a preview of technology to arrive in Firefox 3.1, taps into technology called Loki from Skyhook that deduces a computer’s location from the signals of nearby wireless networks, according to a Mozilla Labs blog post on Geode.

To show the technology off, Mozilla shared an application called Food Finder that shows the user’s approximate location and nearby dining establishments. Others that work with the technology are Pownce, a microblogging site that can record users’ locations as they post notes or photos, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which lets users govern which applications get access to their location information.

There’s one thing I find interesting about the general thrust of this technology. The Internet has broken down geographic barriers, letting people stay in touch with high school buddies, tap into a global market for used books, and find comrades with shared interests such as speaking Latin or photographing mating insects.

But a lot of new work on the Net is trying to unlock the location information. After all, people often need to keep from getting lost or to find their friends at the concert. And of course, plenty of advertisers would like to target ads at people who are likely to walk past a storefront.

Although Geode today uses Skyhook’s service, Firefox 3.1 will be configurable to select other options as well, such as a GPS device, Mozilla said.

The Food Finder demonstration application showed my location, almost, with a blue dot, and nearby pastry shops listed at Yelp.

(Credit: CNET News)

Mozilla envisions more than just more intelligent online maps. Its other examples: local news based on where a person actually is located, a Web site log-in process that only works if a person is at a specific location, and an RSS feed reader that changes what subscriptions it shows users depending on whether they’re at work or home.

Web designers who want to take advantage of the feature can use the W3C’s Geolocation Specification, currently in draft form.

Geode asks permission before letting a Web site use your geographic information.

(Credit: CNET News)

On Tuesday, Adobe issued a workaround for a serious issue that could allow attackers to change the security settings within Flash.

Termed “clickjacking,” the process gives “an attacker the ability to trick a user into clicking on something only barely or momentarily noticeable,” wrote WhiteHat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman in a blog posting last month. He went on to say that while “guarding against Clickjacking was largely the browser vendors’ responsibility,” both he and Robert Hansen agreed to withhold further information and even canceled their talk recently at OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference at the request of Adobe. In return, Adobe thanked the researchers.

In brief, the attack involves embedded objects on a maliciously crafted Web page. Using framed content or that from Flash, Silverlight, or Java, the attacker places a transparent or invisible click button beneath the mouse so that whenever the user clicks on something they see on the page (to see more search results on Google, for example) the user is also clicking to a unseen Web site that may contain malicious code. The attack can also take advantage of dynamic HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) codes to further disguise itself.

In a blog, Guy Aharonovsky describes a process using clickjacking where Flash security settings can be changed to allow an attacker access to a PC’s Webcam or microphone. This, he says, could create remote eavesdropping possibilities.

Although the demonstration page created by Aharonovsky has been disabled, his video demonstration shows a rigged click button as it randomly moves around the page. In reality, the click button under the mouse would be transparent or invisible to the user. In the background Aharonovsky shows the attack modifying the Flash privacy settings. Aharonovsky says “bear in mind that every Flash, Java, Silverlight, DHTML game or application can be used to achieve the same thing.”

The flaws–there may be a half dozen or so specific vulnerabilities related to this–affect users of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. Turning JavaScript off within the browser won’t work. The attack doesn’t rely on JavaScript. Grossman commented: “Clickjacking is a well-known issue, but severely underappreciated and largely undefended.”

Adobe advises users of Flash to set Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager to “always deny.” This means that users will not be asked to allow or deny camera and or microphone access after changing this setting. Adobe says a Flash Player update addressing the issue will be available before the end of the month.

Users of Firefox should in the meantime consider use of the NoScript plug-in and set it to forbid iframe content. More details on configuring NoScript to block this attack can be found here

Additional US-CERT tips for securing other browsers can be found here.

IrfanView packs some mighty editing features in its tiny download.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For making color corrections, printing, managing photo albums, or any of 100 other routine image-editing tasks associated with digital photography, commercial programs like Adobe Photoshop or
Corel Paint Shop Pro are great solutions. But if you just need to resize and crop your personalized
South Park character image to fit on your
Facebook
or
MySpace page, a simpler option is in order.

Luckily, there are a variety of free and easy ways to crop and resize your digital photographs. One of the quickest and easy downloads for doing so is IrfanView, a longtime favorite image viewer that has added more and more editing functionality through the years.

The tiny download weighs in at 1.24MB and literally can be installed in seconds. Once you’ve got it running, open the image that you want to edit and select Image > Resize/Resample to edit the size of your photo. To crop, click your cursor in the top left corner of the area you want to crop, then drag the cursor to create a rectangle. Select Edit > Crop Selection, and voila!

Another free application I’ve become a big fan of recently is
Resizr, created by
Matt Miller back in 2006. Resizr is a free online tool that lets you upload an image from your hard drive or
via a URL. You can then rotate, crop, and resize your image, as well as make edits to brightness and contrast. I was impressed to recently discover that I could even adjust levels and convert
PNG files to JPEGs.

Resizr's space interface holds several quick and valuable options for editing images.

(Credit: CNET Networks/CBS)

What do you use to quickly resize and crop digital images? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you’re too impatient to wait for Google to release its own iPhone app or Safari-optimized version of Google Analytics you might want to check out myAnalytics. This $1.99 iPhone application (app store link) lets you see a general overview of how your sites are doing, and stores the data locally on your device so you can access it when you’re away from a data connection. Considering Google’s most recent release of Analytics requires Adobe Flash, this is the easiest way to get it short of getting your hands on a real computer.

While convenient, it is worth noting that myAnalytics can get bogged down if you intend on using it for more than eight different sites. Also, the current version only shows you basic numbers and a small chart, unlike Google Analytics, which lets you dig deeper into each component of your site. Version 1.1, which is coming soon, will let you view each individual stat on its own graph, which is a good start.

Related: Sergej Müller’s mobile Safari-friendly version of Google Analytics (Note: this only lets you see page views and visitor counts.)

If you're trying to access Google Analytics on the go you can avoid looking at the Flash cube of fail, and instead see some simple, and colorful graphs and charts with myAnalytics.

(Credit: iphone-analytics.de)

If you’ve ever wasted time scouring a long document for every place a specific phrase appears, or worse, have had to look for that phrase in more than one document, you need Rider 8 Tools ($19.95), a slim but powerful search application that finds multiple terms in multiple files within any set of parameters you throw at it.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For instance, if you need to see every time the term “business plan” shows up within three words of “market growth” in a 50-page document, you would use Rider 8 Tools to quickly peruse it. You could also use it to unearth the combination of terms in a certain folder, or to find those phrases everywhere they appear on your hard drive. (Note: that could take some time.) You can even search among multiple file types–Rider 8 Tools can scour Word and text documents, for example, but not PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, or Excel docs (we hope that changes.)

After searching, Rider 8 Tools gives you a few ways to find the text selections and interact with them. The program’s bottom-right quadrant displays the text with the found terms highlighted. You can use buttons to scroll through selections or can use the tree view in the adjacent pane to pick selections from a numbered list. You can print and copy certain selections, or can right-click and choose to view the selection in the context of the document. Opening the selection in Rider 8 Tools gives you a read-only view; opening it in Microsoft Word also lets you edit.

The DefFind tool lets you quickly identify defined terms for referencing or editing.

(Credit: Rider 8 Software)

You can also use Rider 8 Tools to find words you’ve specifically defined, or a group of capitalized terms that could be phrases you’d like to define. The definition look-up is a major selling point for the legal and academic crowd, for whom defining terms is part art, part science, and wholly crucial to shaping the argument at hand. Even if you don’t regularly compose definitions, the benefits of quickly and thoroughly searching through long or technical documents apply to business and marketing professionals, researchers, and so on.

The application is more intuitive and less complicated than it actually looks, but there is a (limited) help file for each of the three search functions if you get stuck. Spending a little time working with Rider 8 Tools will still be the best way to learn it–start in the top left with one of the three ‘Find’ tabs and work your way clockwise.

A pre-release alpha version of a Mac version of uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent client for Windows, has been leaked to the public.

The details window of uTorrent's Mac client, now confirmed to be in alpha.

(Credit: TorrentFreak)

Available from the Swedish torrent Web site The Pirate Bay, the Cocoa-based client has been expected since 2006 when BitTorrent bought uTorrent and promised to develop a Mac version. There was little said since then, until this past August when uTorrent developer Greg Hazel announced that a Mac version would be ready ”in a few weeks,” according to the torrent news Web site TorrentFreak.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s vice president of product evelopment, responded to the leak by saying that the version currently in the wild was not supposed to get out and is not recommended for use, although he hopes that people now believe him when he says that there is a Mac uTorrent client in the works. There is an official notification list for eager users available at the uTorrent site.
http://mac.utorrent.com/

Certain key features don’t work yet, such as searching. Comments about the app on The Pirate Bay confirm its bugginess. So far it only seems to work on Intel-based Macs, and only those running OS X 10.5 or higher. Because this is an extremely early build of the client, it’s not clear at this point how it will stand up to established Mac torrent clients such as Transmission, how it compares to its Windows sibling, or even if this means that a BitTorrent-branded Mac client is in the works.

Ironically, you’ll need a torrent client to download this torrent client, since it’s only available from a torrent Web site.

[Via TorrentFreak]