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Ophcrack Live CD, a free, open source software based on rainbow tables, is a Windows account password cracking tool designed to help you recover lost Windows passwords.

Once you download the 452mb .iso and burn it on a CD, just restart your computer and boot up the Live CD. Once the CD boots, Ophcrack automatically loads and is on its way to crack your password.

Ophcrack Live CD requires physical access to the machine, but if you have physical access you can literally crack every password on a machine in a very short time.

Features:

• Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (intel).
• Cracks LM and NTLM hashes.
• Free tables available for alphanumeric LM hashes.
• Free tables available for Windows XP and Vista.
• Brute-force module for simple passwords.
• LiveCD available to simplify the cracking.
• Free and open source software (GPL).
• Loads hashes from local SAM, remote SAM.
• Loads hashes from encrypted SAM recovered from a Windows partition, Vista included.

The latest version of Ophcrack Live CD is Version 2.0 and there are separate versions for Windows XP and Vista. Get Ophcrack Live CD. You can also get L0phtCrack (aka LC5 which was bought by Symantec) from mirrors like sectools.org.

Popularity: 2% [?]

If you are a blogger and looking to make an extra buck, then Smorty is yet another way to do it. While all of us know Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, Review Me are popular ways to turn your blog into a money making machine, Smorty is a interesting concept where it serves as an interface between the Blogger and the Advertiser.

For a Blogger, there are some fairly simple criteria that your blog needs to satisfy to be approved by Smorty. Once you are through with that, you will get campaign offers which will be presented to you by Smorty on behalf of Advertisers who have signed up. So based on the requirement of the campaign offer and your blog’s content you can accept the offers that you think are relevant.

You are required to post an opinion article based on the details given in the campaign offer. I however noticed an error in their FAQs. While the FAQs state that each article that you post will bring you a minimum of $6, there is an opportunity for $4.80 that I can see when I login. Coming back to the topic, Smorty states that depending on your blog’s page rank, you can receive offers of higher value, even upto $100. Once you are done posting the article, you will have to submit it to Smorty admin for approval. The approval process takes about 5 days.

An interesting thing that is in favor of Smorty is that they pay you every week and the amount is directly credited to your PayPal account, which is free for everyone to use. This is one reason I think bloggers must use Smorty to blog for money.

From the Advertiser’s perspective, in order to advertise on blogs, you are required to bid a minimum of $10 per opinion post. The higher your bid, the better would be the quality of the blogs that will be involved. As for a particular higher bid, Smorty filters and targets only blogs which have a higher pagerank.

This is a great opportunity for any Advertiser to increase his back links to his/her site which directly contributes to increased visibility and popularity of the website on the Internet.

Overall, I feel Smorty will cater to all the new bloggers who want to get paid for blogging and help them sustain till they are accepted by Review Me, PayPerPost etc which have higher requirements and larger payouts.

Declaration: This is a sponsored post.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Note: If you don’t know what Joost is, please read this and watch this video before reading any further.

As a person who generally does not watch TV much, I was surprised at my interest and extensive usage of Joost. The interest is probably because I rather sit in front of the computer instead of the TV. I have tried out Joost at various speeds, ranging from 128 kbps (at home) to 2 mbps (friend’s office) and I have come to the conclusion that the developers of Joost took only a minority of web users who have a high speed internet connection (read as more than 512 kbps) into consideration. Also, even though Joost is free, most internet users have a bandwith limit on their usage and if they don’t keep a check on it, their bills will skyrocket!

While I was installing Joost, I wasn’t really expecting any well known channels and I was again pleasantly surprised at the choices such as MTV, VH1, National Geographic, Nickelodeon etc. I also heard that a few American broadcasters would soon be adding some of their programs to Joost. The audio and video clarity is good too.

Joost does seem very stable for being a beta release. It did crash for me twice and refused to open about 5 times. I also experienced a disconnects a few times but I’m sure that is due to my average internet connection speed. From what I heard from people abroad, Joost seems to work smoothly on a nicely endowed broadband connection.

In the ‘My Joost’ area of the program, there are invites, channel chat and a notice saying that in the future there will be widgets that users can create and add. These are the current widgets available - News Ticker, Instant Messaging, Clock, Invites, Rate It, Channel Chat, an advanced settings area (with parental controls), and a Notice Board. I was able to use the Instant Messaging widget to chat with googletalk users. It also supports jabber.

Overall, I’m highly impressed with what Joost has got to offer and that too for Free. If you still haven’t got an invite, do leave a comment here and I’ll be happy to send you an invite!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I listen to music most of the times and there are quite a lot of songs whose lyrics I like but being the lazy person I am, I don’t search for them on the net. Lyrics Plugin just made my life easier.

Lyrics Plugin is a blessing in disguise for all music lovers who love to sing along. It currently offers support for Winamp and Windows Media Player. I have used both the plugins extensively and they work just fine. No errors for the last 10 days now. Check out the images below. This is how the lyrics are displayed in Winamp and WMP.

What’s more, I even found lyrics for Hindi film music! You can download the Lyrics Plugin for Winamp and Windows Media Player from here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Regardless of whether you are a full time blogger or just started blogging, the pMetrics traffic monitoring tool can be very useful. It can give you a very detailed report of the traffic that will ultimately help you understand your blog and the appeal of its content better. Based on these reports, you can take more effective and educated steps to drive up traffic to your blog.

Performancing Metrics or pMetrics does really well in the way that the data from your blog’s traffic is presented to you. It is all put across to you in a very simple manner. So you don’t need to be tech savvy to get the particular information that you want from it.

You can get an overview of your blog’s traffic in terms of visitors, visitor actions and the average amount of time for which each visitor has spent on your blog. This is really helps in understanding the user’s behavior on your blog. To add to this, you also get a list of the top 10 performing pages in your blog which gives you an idea of which content is considered as more popular. You can also get to know, from which site your visitors got redirected to your blog.

Once you go into the other options, you are presented with data in further detail. You can find out in extreme detail, information about your visitors, their location and the actions that they performed on your blog. While the overview just gave you details about the top 10 pages, you have a tab that fills you in on the performance of all the pages in your blog. You’ve then got a search tab, which fills you in on the searches performed in your blog.

The next two features are my favorites – Links and Spy. On clicking the Links tab, you get the list of not only the sites from which your visitors came, but the full details of the particular link they clicked to reach your blog. You can also get information about outgoing links (links to other sites from your blog, that visitors clicked). Spy is a cool feature that gives you a live view of visitors interacting with your blog. This again helps in understanding visitors’ behaviour in your blog, which can be very useful in increasing traffic to your blog.

Recently, pMetrics has added support for RSS Feeds and Feedburner integration. So you can opt to get a feed of your blog’s traffic trends that can be cached as often as every 30 minutes. This could be very useful in monitoring traffic over short periods of time, when you have just posted something new and expecting traffic to shoot up. Feedburner integration allows you to access feedburner stats from within your pMetrics account.

I started using pMetrics for my blog just 2 days ago, before which i was completely dependent on Google Analytics to extract data about my blog’s traffic. I must say, pMetrics has really caught my eye in terms of functionality and simplicity. It is a great tool for any blog wanting to go places.

I will soon be doing a comparison between pMetrics and Google Analytics to find out which has the upper hand. With pMetrics offering Live Traffic Telemetry, it should turn about to be interesting. So look forward to that post in the next couple of days.

Popularity: 1% [?]