In my last article on the freeware review, I wrote about automatically saving multiple screenshots with smartision ScreenCopy. Try using this program with video. When I was trying to save a screen shot of one of my DVDs for my desktop wallpaper, I captured the entire screen … sans the actual video. Even when I tried pressing the manual “Print Screen” button on the keyboard I got the same result as I pasted the data in IrfanView.
Why is that? I can never dump the screen of any video content? My first response was that it was a copy-protection mechanism, sort of like DRM. But the real, underlying problem was the way my media player rendered the video content.
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Last month, I wrote about automatically cracking the Windows XP password with Ophcrack. In the article, I revealed the simplicity of downloading the Live-on-CD *.iso Linux distribution file and running it at the computer startup.
But sometimes, it is not even necessary to obtain access to a locked Windows machine by that means. There are even easier ways to access an account in Windows XP. These methods do not even require any downloads or storage media (like CDs or floppy disks) to perform them. The only caveat is that these methods will never reveal the password. They will only reset and change the password to any combination that pleases you.
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In my last article about hosting multiple remote desktop sessions from one computer, I provided an example of a Remote Desktop Connection across the Internet from the other side of the world in Tokyo. In that illustration, the Remote Desktop client connected to a static IP address. Unfortunately, most home Internet connections do not work that way. Static IP addresses are usually reserved for business, not consumers. Home Internet users are typically assigned a multiple of dynamic IP addresses via DCHP each year. Sometimes these addresses are released every day, every week, every month, every year, every time the computer/router reboots, or every time the MAC address on the Internet node changes. If a home user wants a static IP address, he or she would have to make a special request to his or her ISP and pay extra. The last time I checked, that price ran around $50 per address! For me, that’s paying double for my broadband Internet connection!
Dynamic IP address licensing poses a problem when hosting VPN Connections, Remote Desktop Sessions, or just plain Apache HTTP Web Server Connections. Since you can’t anticipate when the ISP will assign a new IP address, you might be stuck in Tokyo trying to connect to your home network using an expired IP address. That’s not very pleasant at all! Does this inconvenience justify the static IP address fee? I’m a cheapie. So for me, it does not. Besides, there are just some broadband providers who do not offer static IP addresses, period! What’s there to do?
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