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Gimp

Gimp is editing software that is very similar to Photoshop. It’s an open-source application for the MAC and PC. It provides tools for editing and retouching your images. It also provides layers, like Photoshop, and tools for painting and animation.

Screenshot from Gimp

Photoscape

Photoscape is an easy-to-use editing software. Some of the key features include the editor, batch editor, combine, and face search. The editor allows you to resize, adjust the brightness and color, add text, draw pictures, crop, add filters, use red eye removal, and more. The batch editor allows you to edit multiple photos at once. The combine feature will result in one large photo by combining photos vertically or horizontally.

Screenshot from Photoscape

Pixlr

Pixlr is a popular choice for editing photographs. Choose from three levels for editing your photos: Open Pixlr Editor (Advanced), Open Pixlr Express (Efficient), and Open Pixlr-o-matic (Playful). It’s quick and similar to Photoshop. You can crop, re-size, remove red-eye, and whiten teeth. Pixlr also offers mobile apps of the Pixlr Express and Pixlr-o-matic levels for iOS and Android. The new Pixlr Express Plus version for iOS allows you to add text and stickers! Try out the Pixlr Grabber extension for both Firefox and Chrome so you can grab and edit photos as you surf the web.

Screenshot from Pixlr

Lightroom 5

The New York Times talks about Photoshop’s temporary, free photography editing software, Lightroom 5. It is a beta testing version which will become unavailable once the upgrade version is released. It is easier to use than Photoshop and has some new exciting features. New York Times describes the Radial Gradient feature:

Adobe has also added a feature called Radial Gradient, which lets photographers draw a circular or oval area in which to apply effects. It can be used to create a vignette, where a picture darkens toward the edges, for instance. So you could circle someone’s face, and have the picture dim as it moves away from her, creating a spotlight to draw the eye.

Another feature is the Upright which corrects warped areas due to lens distortion.

Lighthouse 5 Upright Feature Screenshot from New York Times

Adobe Photoshop Express App

This free app is nice for on-the-go cropping and editing. It is available for both iOS and Android. Zoom in, Crop, straighten, rotate, flip, and remove red eye. Use slider controls to find the right color. Adjust the hue, brightness, and white balance of your photos. Then, share with your friends and family.

Photoshop Express Screenshot from Adobe

HeliosPaint

HeliosPaint is a paint program for editing photos and other images. Some of the tools and features include: pencil for editing pixels; adjustable paint brush and spray can with edge feathering; copy brush for copying an area to another area for retouching, healing, and blending; and shape tool for creating freehand, polygon, star, moon, and heart shapes. Heliospaint also allows printing with auto fit to page and allows you to export image to PDF file.

Screenshot from Heliospaint

Video Credit: Youtube, Hack College

2013 has been a year filled with hacks on big brands through social media. As we saw last week, the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked. But the real question is, what are the steps involved to recover from social media hacks? Thanks to PC World, this question can be solved in four simple steps. In 4 steps to reclaim your social media after a hack attack, PC World gives users an idea on what they must do to fully recover.

Posted below is a brief overview of the article. To read the full post be sure to visit PC World.

Regain control of your account

Change your password as soon as you notice that your social media account has been compromised. If you are unable to do this because your Twitter account was suspended, PC World suggests visiting support.twitter.com/forms/hacked. This form will help you reclaim your account.

Delete posts and tell your audience

It is important to delete all posts and tweets that were posted to your page. Afterwards, you should inform your friends and followers about the hack and let them know that everything has been taken care of. Eric Johnson was quoted by PC World stating,

“Time is of the essence. Be sure to rebroadcast the issue on every channel available to you,” he says. “Post a message on your website’s homepage, tweet it, post it on Facebook and other social media sites. This ensures they know about the problem and it reduces the damage.”

Review your social media process

For this step, PC World suggests that you review both the processs and people that control these accounts. From there, examine the procedures and look for areas to improve upon.

Preach and teach online safety

Teach and train others how to properly use social media. In addition, be sure to review processes to protect your brand or identity online.

Image Credit: Bit Social Media

Just think about all of the information that you enter onto your device. Your personal email, bank statements, social networking, and credit card numbers are just a few pieces of information that can be stored on your computer or smartphone. Luckily, Mashable covers everything you need to know from the basics to programs to use.

To learn more, be sure to read the full article below.

How to Erase Your Data From an Old Computer or Phone

Sue Marquette Poremba, TechNewsDaily Contributor for TechNewsDaily

If you’re disposing of old documents such as bank statements and tax forms, security experts recommend shredding the paperwork so it can’t be used by identity thieves.

It’s a practice everyone should be familiar with, since it may be the top recommendation for preventing identity theft.

However, many consumers and organizations are turning to a paperless world, and records once held in filing cabinets are now stored on computer hard drives.

But computers eventually get replaced, and old computers are donated, recycled, handed down or refurbished — often with personally identifiable information (PII) still on the machine.

Pick up any old computer being tossed out on the street, and odds are its hard drive will have a wealth of information on its previous owners.

SEE ALSO: 7 Easy Ways to Get Your Identity Stolen

The Basics

Simply deleting the data by emptying the “trash” folder won’t totally wipe all that information away.

Before you dispose of an old personal computer, the experts recommend that the very least you do is reformat your hard drive and reinstall the operating system. A better bet is to wipe your hard drive clean.

“With computers, it isn’t difficult to wipe data, if you understand what you are doing and do it correctly,” said Greg Kelley, chief technology officer with Vestige Digital Investigations in Medina, Ohio.

“The most important thing to consider is that to be certain that you got all of your data, you need to wipe the entire hard drive,” Kelley said. “Programs such as BCWipe and Eraser can perform this work.”

An even easier way to do this, provided the user has Windows Vista or better, is to create a system repair disk and then format the hard drive using the standard format command, said Matthew Kinney, executive vice president of research and development with staffing-software maker BWSI in Phoenix.

“This also uses the write-zero approach, overwriting each block with binary zeroes, and is super easy,” Kinney said. “I have recommended this to many of my friends who aren’t tech people and have them use the instructions on About.com.”

However, not every attempt to clean off the hard drive is 100% successful. If that’s the case, and if you want to keep the hard drive with the computer, Kelley recommended taking the machine to a qualified computer technician to perform the work.

“Make sure that the computer technician is one [who] understands that deleting a file, formatting a hard drive or reinstalling an operating system doesn’t render the data unrecoverable,” Kelley said. “Those technicians will know enough to identify the proper tools to wipe your drive.”

If you’re sending your computer to be recycled, or you’re donating it to a relative or a charity, the best way to protect your personal data is to simply remove the hard drive and physically destroy the drive.

Off the Premises

Eliminating personal data from personal computers kept at home is relatively easy. The real problems lie with mobile devices and work computers.

Smartphone and tablet owners now store a great deal of personally identifiable information on these devices.

Apps are available to “wipe” the devices if they are lost or stolen, but the technology is still relatively new and these apps leave some data behind.

“Many cellphones have a ‘restore to factory defaults’ option that will delete data, but in many instances, it has been shown that this does not always work,” said Adam Wosotowsky, messaging data architect at Santa Clara, Calif., digital-security firm McAfee. “Additionally, they are not overwriting the data multiple times to prevent forensic equipment from being able to recover it.”

If you intend to never use the phone again, the best option is to physically destroy it. However, if you want to recycle the phone, your safest option may be to sell it to a company that refurbishes phones for re-sale.

The reason to follow this path, said Kyle Marks of Retire-IT, a Columbus, Ohio, firm specializing in computer disposal, is because these companies could end up being liable if your personal data is found on a device they refurbished and sold. In this case, it is in their best interest to make sure your data is safe.

Do You Trust Your Boss?

Businesses also have an interest in making sure personal data is kept secure. But Marks pointed out that while most companies have a strict record of incoming inventory, they are more lax when it comes to disposal of equipment.

If your computer is being replaced, or if you are leaving the company, you will want to make sure that you have at least deleted everything that holds your personally identifiable information, including temporary files and browsing histories.

You can also ask your IT support staff about what happens to old equipment, and whether the machines are wiped clean or the hard drives are reformatted.

“A mature, well-run company should have a formal procedure in place for computer disposal,” Marks said. “But you have every right to be concerned if your IT support takes a ‘we’ll take care of it, don’t worry’ attitude when you ask about computer disposal.”

Unfortunately, there might be nothing you can do about that.

“Once that data is on the computer, depending on company policy and local laws, you may no longer have ownership to that data,” Kelley said.

Instead, Kelley said, leave your banking, personal emailing and social networking to your home computer. That way, you can control what happens to your personally identifiable information when the time comes to get rid of your old equipment.

Macworld recently posted an article on how to track a lost computer with Find My Mac. Similar to Find My iPhone, Find My Mac is a service that allows users to locate stolen or missing Apple computers. Now that Apple has also included Macs into the Find My Device series, apple fanatics can now track their Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Posted below is the full article from Macworld which details how to use this app to track a lost or stolen computer:

How to track a lost computer with Find My Mac

Serenity Caldwell

Apr 19, 2013 4:00 AM

If your computer is stolen or otherwise liberated from your possession, don’t despair: If you’ve remembered to enable Find My Mac, you can track it, remotely lock it, and even send messages to your Mac’s screen.

You may have already enabled the Find My Mac service if you’ve set up your Mac with a free iCloud account. You can check by opening the iCloudpreference pane in System Preferences. If you’re already logged in to iCloud, all you have to do is make sure you’ve selected the Find My Maccheckbox; if you’re not logged in (or if you don’t have an iCloud account), you can go ahead and do so from this screen. After you turn on Find My Mac, you’re set—you don’t need to do anything else unless your Mac falls into wayward hands.

If the worst happens, you can track your Mac via iCloud.com or the Find My iPhone app on your iPad or iPhone. (We should note that even though the app is called Find My iPhone, it allows you to find any iOS device or Mac.)

You can use the Find My iPhone iOS app or the iCloud website to find them. Launch the app on any iOS device, signing in with your Apple or iCloud ID and password; or log in at iCloud.com and click the Find My iPhone button.

The Devices list displays every device—iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac—associated with your account that has Find My iPhone enabled. A green dot next to a device means Find My iPhone located it; a gray dot means the device is offline or could not be found. The status of each device—how long ago it was located, or that it wasn’t located—appears just below its name.

If Find My iPhone can locate your device, it will show it on the map, where you can zoom in and out, and switch between Map, Satellite, and Hybrid views. Unfortunately, you can’t track the location of your Mac over time: Unlike the Lost Mode available to iOS devices, Find My Mac shows only the most-recent location of your computer.

You can also have your Mac play a sound—handy if you’ve misplaced it somewhere in the house; plus you can lock it remotely with a numeric passcode or remotely erase it.

If you opt to remotely lock your Mac, the computer will actually shut down once it receives the lock command. The next time you attempt to start up the Mac, it will boot into recovery mode and ask you to enter the passcode; if you opted to display a message, that message will appear on the same screen. Once you’ve entered the correct passcode, the Mac will reboot normally.

The final option is Erase Mac. As you might expect, this feature lets you completely erase—securely—all data and settings from your Mac. It also sets a four-digit passcode that lets you regain access to your Mac if you ever recover it. You should use the Erase Mac option only as a last resort. (And it’s one of many good reasons to have a current backup of your Mac.)

You’ll receive an email sent to the address on file for your Apple ID when you perform any of these actions.

If the service can’t locate your Mac, you still have the option of playing a sound, remotely locking the computer, or remotely erasing it, but these actions won’t take effect until the Mac connects to the Internet. To receive an email notification when your Mac does come online again, select the Notify me when found checkbox.

As useful and convenient as Find My Mac is, it does come with a caveat: Should a malicious party compromise your iCloud account, they could remotely wipe your Mac, as happened to Wired’s Mat Honan. So if you do enable this feature, make sure that your iCloud account has a strong password and, for best results, enable Apple’s two-step authentication.

To view the full article be sure to visit Macworld.

Image Credit: Macworld

According to a survey taken in 2012 by Lookout, 62% of Americans have outdated cell phones around their home. This can happen for a number of reasons. Some people may be using them as a backup in case their active phone breaks. While others keep old cell phones because they are unsure what to do with them.

Have you ever thought about recycling your old smartphone? If so, this post should be really helpful for you. Listed below are a few options for you to explore:

• Donate your phone to the troops
• Sell it on Glyde
• Sell it back to Apple
• Donate to survivors of domestic violence
• Search your options with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• Send your phone to CTIA for Refurbishing

Don’t just keep your old cell phone around. Find a way to recycle it so it serves a better purpose than collecting dust.

To learn more about recycling cellphones, be sure to visit Mashable.

Image Credit: Kootation

Today, Twitter announced its latest service Twitter #music. For a couple of weeks this project was just a rumor until they officially announced its released on Good Morning America. According to a blog post, Twitter #music,

“uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists…The songs on Twitter #music currently come from three sources: iTunes, Spotify or Rdio.”

Similar to iTunes, users on Twitter #music can listen to a brief sample of each song. However, if they are subscribers to Rdio or Spotify they can simply log into their account to enjoy the full song. In addition to a popular page, Twitter #music also has a search feature. There, you can listen to a song from your favorite and similar artists. A few other features Twitter #music has includes:

• Popular – playing the most popular music on the service.
• Emerging- new artists that you should check out.
• Suggested – suggested tracks based off previous music you’ve listened to.
• #Nowplaying – this feature plays music that some of your friends are currently are listening to.
• Me- this station features music of the artists you follow on twitter.

To learn more, read the announcement from the Twitter blog.

Image Credit: Twitter captured by Jessicaml_

Breaking News - @BreakingNews
BBC Breaking News- @BBCBreaking
CNN Breaking News- @cnnbrk
WSJ Breaking News- @WSJbreakingnews
Reuters Live- @ReutersLive
CBS Top News- @CBSTopNews
Al Jazeera English Live- @AJELive
Sky News Newsdesk- @SkyNewsBreak
ABC News Live- @ABCNewsLive
The Weather Channel Breaking- @TWCBreaking

Do you have any breaking news twitter accounts that you think should be added to the list? Tweet us @wvuoit