What is my IP address?

April 2nd, 2011

If you’ve wondered what your IP address is, you can use this page to quickly check it:

Your IPv4 address: 38.107.179.211

Couldn’t I get my IP address directly from my computer, you might ask? Try it: first locate the window that displays the status of the network connection that your computer uses to connect to the Internet:

Local area connection status window

The exact method of getting to this information depends on the version of Windows (or other operating system) that you have. It should be somewhere around the properties of your LAN or wireless connection or the network adapter. In any case, after you open this window, click on the Details button to see more information about your connection, like this:

Network Connection Details window

This window shows my IPv4 address as 192.168.0.195 (your window could show a different, but similar address, too). If it’s different from the address displayed on this web page above, it’s probably because you are connecting to the Internet not directly, but via a router. Or, if you are connecting via a proxy, then the IP address of the proxy would be shown above. In any case, that’s how your Internet connection appears to the world!

Amazon Cloud Drive offers free 5 GB online storage

March 29th, 2011

There is a new player in the online backup marketplace and it is Amazon.com: you can now have 5 GB of online storage free of charge, to store files of any kind, including music, videos, pictures, or other types of documents!

It’s very easy to start using it: all you need to do is log in to your existing Amazon.com account (who does not have one yet?) and click on the Upload files button to begin uploading your files to the storage. Or, click on the Cloud Drive button to see the files and folders that are already there. Right, all you need is a web browser and an Amazon.com account, and you are good to go.

Before you jump in, though, take time to actually read the Terms and Conditions for the Cloud Drive service displayed when you first attempt to upload files. There are a few portions of them worth considering (and remembering!). Such as:

5.3.Security. We do not guarantee that Your Files will not be subject to misappropriation,
loss or damage and we will not be liable if they are. You're responsible for maintaining
appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Files.

That is, don’t assume the files you put in the Cloud Drive will be absolutely safe. Always have a backup of your important files elsewhere, to be able to restore them in case of a problem with the Cloud Drive service. Another interesting paragraph from the Terms and Conditions:

5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and
disclose your account information and Your Files...

This tells us that the files you upload to Cloud Drive are NOT encrypted with a private key that only you have access to: Amazon can have a look into your files if they decide they want to. Keep that in mind, and if a file has a secret you don’t want anyone else to see, do NOT upload it to Cloud Drive, or encrypt the file with strong encryption before uploading it.

Will Amazon Cloud Front create a strong competition to other online backup solutions such as Dropbox, Mozy, or CrashPlan? Not yet. Not until Amazon adds some sort of automatic file synchronization functionality, like these services offer. Still, if you don’t mind handling the backups manually, and have the discipline to do it regularly, Amazon Cloud Drive is certainly a service to consider.

Folder Guard 8.4 released

March 25th, 2011

Buy Folder Guard:
Personal license $39.95
Business license $79.95

Try Folder Guard free:
Download free trial

We’ve just released an updated version 8.4 of our password-protection software Folder Guard that corrects several minor issues:

A problem has been corrected that caused the hidden folder attribute not to be applied properly in some situations.
A problem has been corrected that caused the desktop icons to become hidden after disabling the protection in some situations.
A problem has been corrected that in some situations caused the Toggle Protection command not to accept the password even if the correct password was entered.
Several other minor improvements and corrections have been made.

If you did not experience these problems, you may want to skip this update. Or, please feel free to download it from our web site and give it a try. As before, if you have purchased your Folder Guard license within the previous 12 months, you can upgrade to Folder Guard 8.4 free of charge. Otherwise, please use the upgrade web page to order the new license and receive the automatic 50% discount.

AB Commander updated to version 8.2

March 18th, 2011

Buy AB Commander:
Personal license $39.95
Business license $79.95

Try AB Commander free:
Download free trial

We’ve just released a minor update to AB Commander that corrects the problem with the Synchronize command that made the command work incorrectly. We’ve also added the capability to hide (and unhide) folders in the Go to folder window.

As always, a 30-day free trial is available, please give the new version a try!

Why can’t I copy large files over 4GB to my USB flash drive?

February 19th, 2011

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
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The capacity of your external flash drive is large: 8GB, 16GB, or more. There is enough free space on the drive. You can copy the smaller files to the external drive just fine. Yet, when you attempt to copy a large file (4GB or larger) to the external drive, Windows gives you an error (such as: There is not enough free space on the drive, or similar.) Does this sound familiar?

If you experience such a problem, most probably it’s caused by the fact that your flash drive is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This type of a file system has a built-in limitation on the size of the files that it may contain. Although the total size of the files that you can copy to a FAT32 drive could be as large as 2TB (or the physical capacity of the drive, whichever is smaller), the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB.

This limitation may sound silly: why would anyone design a system that would not allow for the larger files? The problem is, when the FAT32 file system was designed (that was back in the days of Windows 95), no one anticipated that we would have such large files in use today. Or, maybe the designers hoped that by the time such large files become common, the use of the FAT32 system would be replaced by the more modern systems.

In any case, how to solve the problem of copying the 4GB files? Easy: you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with the NTFS file system. The latter does not have the 4GB file size limitation, and it also allows for many other functions not supported by FAT32: file security, encryption, compression, etc.

One caveat, however: the older versions of Windows (such as Windows 95, 98, or Windows Millennium, remember those?) do not support the NTFS file system. If you plan on using the drive with such old computers, then DO NOT format the drive with NTFS, because you won’t be able to get the old Windows to recognize it anyway. If, however, you only plan on using the drive with the more recent versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and of course Windows 7, such computers should work with the NTFS drives just fine.

How to change the drive from FAT32 to NTFS format?

There are several ways to go. If the drive is empty or contains no important files of yours, the easiest way is to use the Windows Format command to format the drive with the NTFS file system. Specifically:

1. Attach the external flash drive to the computer, wait for Windows to recognize it and assign a new drive letter to it.

2. Open the Computer folder and locate the drive letter assigned to the flash drive you want to format with NTFS (in the example below, it’s drive F:)

3. Before continuing, open the drive in a window and make sure it’s empty or does not contain any important files, because after you format a drive, all information that was on it will be erased! If there are files on the drive that you want to keep, take this opportunity to copy them over to the hard drive or some other drive.

4. If you are sure that the external drive contains no important files of yours, go back to the Computer folder, and right click on the icon of the external drive:

(Click to enlarge)

5. Select Format from the menu, and then choose the formatting options:

Options for formatting the external drive with NTFS file system

6. Make sure to select NTFS in the File System drop-down list. That’s what determines the kind of a file system that the drive should have. Also, you may want to select the Quick Format option, which should speed up the formatting process quite considerably.

7. Press Start, and Windows should warn you once again about erasing any existing information on the drive (see step 3 above). Again, if you are sure the drive does not contain any irreplaceable documents, confirm that you want to proceed with the formatting:

Windows warns you about erasing the existing files during the drive formatting

8. If you’ve selected the Quick format option, the formatting should take no longer than a minute or two.

As a result, you should have the same drive, but now it should have the NTFS files system on it. Now you should be able to copy the files larger than 4GB to the drive just fine.

In addition to formatting a drive with the NTFS file system, Windows also offers a way to convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS. The difference is that the conversion process would keep the existing files on the drive. See Windows Help and Support of your computer for the instructions on how to do the conversion.

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
Download free trial

One last note: our encryption software USBCrypt can create a NTFS-formatted Virtual Encrypted Disk even if the host drive is formatted with FAT32. This suggests yet another solution: instead of formatting the host disk with NTFS, you can instead use USBCrypt to create a NTFS-formatted Virtual Encrypted Disk. If you do that, then in addition to breaking the 4GB file size barrier, you would also get the strong security and password protection for files you put inside of the Virtual Encrypted Disk. See the USBCrypt web page for more information or to download a free 30-day trial.

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• Accountants and tax preparers
• Office Administrators and Secretaries
• Doctors, Dentists, and Surgeons
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• Lawyers and Attorneys
• Sales Professionals
• Teachers, professors, and educators
• Small business owners
• Students

AB Commander updated to version 8.1

February 12th, 2011

Buy AB Commander:
Personal license $39.95
Business license $79.95

Try AB Commander free:
Download free trial

We’ve just released a minor update 8.1 to AB Commander. What’s new in this version:

An option for the internal Quick Editor has been added that allows you to enable or disable the warning message displayed when you attempt to open a write-protected file with the internal Quick Editor.
When you sort files by clicking on the columns in the file panels, AB Commander no longer scrolls to the previously selected item.
A problem has been corrected that caused AB Commander to navigate to the parent folder when changing to the Details view.

As always, a free 30-day license is included with every download, give it a try!

ActiveExit updated to version 10.8.2

February 1st, 2011

We’ve just released a minor update to ActiveExit that improves the reporting of the license violation conditions.

Previously, when ActiveExit detected that it was running on more computers than allowed by its license, it only reported the detailed information on the violation in the system event queue. Now, it also displays such information on the main screen of its configuration utility, making it easy to troubleshoot such situations.

Note: If you have not experienced the problem described above, you don’t need to install this update.

Test the strength of your password with USBCrypt

January 20th, 2011

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
Download free trial

When using USBCrypt to password protect drives, you have probably wondered, how difficult would it be for someone to just try all possible character combinations and discover the correct password that way? If someone were to write a program to automate the process of simulating the password entry, how fast would it take to discover the correct password?

Well, you may be surprised to learn that there is no need to write a special program for that, because USBCrypt already includes such a command out of the box! It’s easy to try it: just try starting an encrypted drive, as usual, but instead of entering the password, click on the Tools button and select the Recover Password item on the menu:

On the next screen, select the character set you want to try. You can select the minimum and maximum length of the passwords to try, and also choose between the lower-case or upper-case characters, digits, special characters, or any combination of them:

The settings for the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

When you press the Start button, USBCrypt starts to try the passwords from the character set you’ve selected, in turn, until it finds one that unlocks the encrypted drive. It displays the progress in a separate window, that also shows the estimated time to complete the enumeration of all possible passwords:

The progress of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

If you’ve selected a very simple password, it can be discovered rather quickly, and the result is displayed right away:

The successful result of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

What about the more complex passwords? The time to try them all grows rapidly as the length of the password or its complexity increases. Here are a few numbers, obtained on a computer with a mid-range (as of the time of this writing) Intel i5-650 CPU:

Characters/Maximum length	Up to 3	Up to 5	Up to 7
Lowercase	30 minutes	15 days	28 years
Lowercase + Uppercase	4 hours	1 year	35 hundred years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits	7 hours	3 years	12 thousand years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits + all special characters	1 day	26 years	240 thousand years

(You may get different numbers, depending on the CPU your computer has.)

Buy USBCrypt:
Personal license $49.95
Business license $99.95

Try USBCrypt free:
Download free trial

As you can see, by choosing a password that’s complex enough, you can protect your secrets with USBCrypt pretty well. On the flip side, take care to remember your password, because if you forget it, it would be practically impossible to recover it (unless you have created a spare key file with USBCrypt, of course.

Happy encrypting!

More information

AB Commander 8.0 released

January 2nd, 2011

Happy New Year everyone!

We’ve just released a new version 8.0 of our file manager AB Commander. The new version offers tab browsing, the ability to set up an alternative file viewer, as well as several other improvements and fixes.

As always, a free 30-day license is built-in in every download, give it a try!

Setting up the external text editor for AB Commander

December 29th, 2010

Buy AB Commander:
Personal license $39.95
Business license $79.95

Try AB Commander free:
Download free trial

As you probably know, AB Commander comes with a built-in text editor that you can use to quickly edit text files. It’s easily accessible from within AB Commander: just select the text file you want to edit or view, and press the Ctrl+Q key combination. The text file will open in a separate window, offering the basic file editing capabilities:

The built-in text editor of AB Commander

Couldn’t you just double-click on the text file to open it with Notepad, you might ask? Yes, of course you could, but the problem is that that would work only with the text files that are registered with Windows as the text files. (Such as the .txt files). However, there are other types of the text files that Windows would treat differently when you double-click them. For example, the .bat files would start executing, and the .xml files would be opened in your web browser, even though internally they are just the regular text files. That’s when the internal text editor of AB Commander comes handy: it does not pay attention to the file name extension, it just opens the file for editing, period.

In addition to the internal text editor, AB Commander also offers a way to set up an alternative text editor for use in cases when the capabilities of the built-in editor are not sufficient enough. By default, the external text editor is set up to run Windows Notepad. (Try it: you can open a text file with the external text editor by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Q). Notepad, however, does not offer much more than the built-in text editor. If you really want to have a powerful text editor at your fingertips, you may want to change the external text editor from Notepad to something more advanced.

There are many text editors available (a quick Google or Bing search should reveal many of them). One of the more popular ones is Notepad++, a free and open source tool that offers many advanced text editing features, including syntax highlighting, tabbed user interface, plug-in support, etc.

To set up Notepad++ as the external text editor in AB Commander, choose View – Options from the AB Commander menu, and select the Editor page:

Changing options for the text editors used by AB Commander

Click on the Options button next to the External choice, and then enter the path to the Notepad++ executable into the box:

Changing options for the external text editor of AB Commander

Keep in mind that on your computer Notepad++ could be installed into a different folder than shown. For example, if you have a 64-bit version of Windows, then Notepad++ would most probably be installed under the C:\Program Files (x86) folder. You can always determine the correct path by analyzing the properties of the shortcut to Notepad++ that you use (on the Desktop or on the Start Menu):

Properties of the shortcut to Notepad++ show the correct path to the external text editor

Another option you have is which editor (internal or external) you want to be the preferred one (that is, accessible via the Ctrl+Q keyboard shortcut), and which one alternative (accessible via the Ctrl+Shift+Q combination). You can choose that on the Editor page shown above.

Happy text editing!