Ever experienced this scenario? You’re helping a friend – or worse, one of your parents – over the phone with his or her computer. And he or she either doesn’t know what you are talking about or is too slow to completely carry out your instructions in this lifetime. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just see what they see and remotely input with your keyboard and mouse?

VNC is nice and all but who wants to walk someone through additional instructions for installing a VNC server? How about that crippled terminal service derivative called Remote Assistance? I’ve used that before and it is pretty limiting. Wouldn’t it be great to actually be able to log on their computer like in Remote Desktop? If your friend is using Windows XP, Vista, or Server for business environments (i.e. not “Home Edition”) you may be in luck. They only problem is actually enabling the Remote Desktop protocol, which, by default, is turned off.
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As a web designer and administrator, there are certain routine “housekeeping” tasks that you have to perform with your server. These tasks can include data backup, traffic analysis, and server log audits. But there is one job that website administrators often fail to do, link checking. In this era of Web 2.0 and blogs where content has evolved from static and unchanging to dynamic and volatile, it is very important to make sure that your anchor tags (<a>) are intact.

Not only is link validation an important monthly routine task, it is a crucial, mission-critical operation when moving web servers or changing domain names. When I moved this website from http://freeware.art-app.com to http://www.freewarereview.info, it was literally hell in cyberspace. Even with my carefully hand-crafted .htaccess 301 redirects, my readership dropped and my server logs were filled with 404 error messages.
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In two of my previous posts, I wrote stripping the FairPlay DRM from iTunes files with hymn and QTFairPlay. Last year, something happened that was even more groundbreaking than the FairPlay exploit. Another talented group of people cracked the Windows Media Player DRM!

Why is this so important? The WMP DRM, also known as Janus, is “The DRM.” Most companies utilize it to protect their multimedia content from easy piracy. This is the DRM behind “playforsure” and “To Go” technologies found in many portable audio players. This does not just disrupt the peace of the music industry. It shakes the ground of the motion picture industry! Online music stores like Napster and MusicMatch to online rental sites like CinemaNow and MovieLink have been affected. With the unlimited “buffet-type” music subscription plans like with Rhapsody, you can download the multi-million song database, convert the files to MP3, and distribute them online! With online movie rental sites, you can download flicks for a mere 2 dollars, strip the DRM, and torrent it!
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