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Techradar |
- Tutorial: How to spot faked photos
- Buying Guide: Best video editing software under £100
- Review: Adobe Acrobat X Pro
- Review: AVG Live Kive
- Review: Enermax Jazzmate EB211U3-B
- Tutorial: How to spot suspicious processes in Windows 7
- Review: HIS Multi-View II USB Display Adaptor
| Tutorial: How to spot faked photos Posted: 22 May 2011 01:00 AM PDT Like it or not, photographic manipulation is now easier and the results better than ever before. Usually, the alterations are fairly benign - removing red-eye or fixing the light balance, for example - but sometimes the change is designed to affect our emotions and our understanding. Given that we're bombarded with images throughout the day, how can we teach ourselves to recognise the fakery when we come across it? Faked images have been with us since the start of the photographic era. Who can forget the five photos of the Cottingley Fairies from 1917 that duped the author of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? With today's cynical eye, the photos are amateurish - laughable, even - but they did fool a lot of people for some time. Sceptic James Randi came up with the proof in 1978: the fairies were traced from drawings in Princess Mary's Gift Book (a publication from 1917) and mounted on cardboard. Back in the pre-digital days, modifying photographs by removing existing artifacts or adding elements that weren't there was hard work. There were therefore more photos where the fakery was due to a staged subject (Robert Wilson's infamous 'Surgeon's Photograph' of the Loch Ness monster, or Robert Doisneau's famous 'Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville' rather than a deliberately altered original (like Yevgeny Khaldei's 'Raising a Flag over the Reichstag', where the smoke was enhanced and a (presumably looted) watch on a soldier's wrist was edited out of the picture). Digital manipulation However, as soon as programs like Adobe Photoshop arrived on the scene and digital cameras became affordable enough for everyday use, the propensity for digital manipulation of photographs took off. Alongside this explosion of digital photography, we saw the creation of a specialised field called digital forensics, which attempts to uncover instances of deliberate falsification in digital images. It's important to remember that photos are often altered for simple aesthetic reasons. When taking a photo of a group with a flash, it's pretty certain that some of the people will exhibit what's known as 'red-eye', where the light from the flash is reflected off the retina and seen in the image as a red spot on the pupil. This is simple to fix (change the colour from red to black), and many photo-editing programs include this functionality as a matter of course. Many modern cameras are also able to manipulate images to remove red-eye, alongside their capability for face-detection. Falsifying skill There's also the ability to modify the white balance of the photo, or to adjust the brightness and contrast to create a more pleasing image. Again, it's not really falsifying the photograph (more falsifying the photographer's skill), and even in the pre-digital era, photographers would do the same kind of processing in the dark room. Another popular visual fix for photos is to crop the image to remove any jarring or distracting elements along the edges. That way the viewer's attention is concentrated on what the photographer wants to say with the picture rather than extraneous detail. This is hardly a problem unless, for example, the picture is of a house for sale and the cropping removes the derelict car in the neighbour's drive. The clone brush Of course, all these changes are fairly benign in the grand scheme of things, and I'm sure we've all been guilty of them to a greater or lesser extent. How about this next one: using the clone brush in your favourite photo editor to remove that intrusive telegraph pole and wires from an otherwise perfect landscape? Yes, guilty. If the cloning has been done carefully, this kind of change is hard to detect visually (unless you know the original view, for example, or can find similar photos taken from the same vantage point online), and can be very hard to detect without some kind of software. We'll take a look a little later on to see how this kind of change could be spotted. Professor Hany Farid, of the Department of Computer Science in Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, has been researching how we can visually spot changes in photographs. Although we as humans are extremely good at face recognition, quickly understanding a scene, and determining direction and speed of motion, it turns out we're worse at spotting problems with lighting and shadows, and distortions caused by perspective. Lighting and perspective This is somewhat unfortunate, since the first step in judging the authenticity of a photograph is to check shadows, lighting and perspective. Since our visual acuity is easily fooled, we have to pay attention. Take, for example, the rather disturbing 'Accidental Tourist' photo that made the email rounds just after 9/11. It purportedly shows a man standing on the observation deck just before a plane hit one of the World Trade Center towers, but if you can avoid the initial sense of horror this creepy photo gives you and look at it more carefully, you'll start to notice incongruities in the various shadows. For example, both the plane and the man are 'nose-on' in perspective. The man has some very sharp shadows on his face - dark enough that it's hard to determine any details about his right side - yet the plane looks as if the sun is directly overhead: there are virtually no shadows on the upper surface. So, our initial revulsion means that we don't pay attention to the clues that indicate fakery in the image. Professor Farid points out that there is a simple technique for detecting incongruities with regard to shadows. Because light travels in a straight line, you can easily draw a straight line between a point on an object being lit and the same point on its shadow. Extend the line in the direction of the light source. All such extended lines in an image should meet at some point, or in the case of the sun, should all be parallel to each other. The problem is finding some obvious point of the object and the same point on its shadow. Follow the light Another technique that can help you identify manipulated photos is to look at highlights. Are the highlights on surfaces all 'pointing' in the same direction as the assumed light source? A line perpendicular to any highlight's surface should point towards the light source. If you notice that these perpendiculars are pointing in different directions, something's not right. Of great use here are the highlights in people's eyes: if you zoom in, these highlights should all be in the same direction. When you're looking for altered photos, also keep an eye out for obvious repetitions in the image. One of the most famous examples of this (mainly because it got past the photo desk at Reuters with no problem before being called out by the world at large) is the photo by Adnan Hajj of smoke over Beirut after an Israeli bombing raid. The smoke from two separate plumes shows distinct patterns of duplication, probably through use of a cloning tool; it's so badly done, it looks obviously fake. Professor Farid is trying to extend this type of visual check into a software tool that tries to spot cloned cells (that is, blocks of copied pixels) in a photo. Understanding formats The images we see online are usually in JPG format. This format is extremely popular, mainly because of its small file sizes and near-universality. Many point-and-shoot cameras only record their photos in JPG format, but larger more expensive DSLRs have an option to save images in either RAW or JPG format (or both at the same time). The most important point to understand about JPGs is that they're compressed to create the smallest possible file sizes. Not only that, but the compression used is a lossy format; in other words, the image we see in a JPG file is not exactly the same as the original photo, because some information has been discarded. If you like, information is averaged out in a strict mathematical way to make the image data more compressible. What this means is that, although a JPG file is a very close representation of the original image, it's not quite the same. If a JPG is then saved again, the errors caused by the compression format are multiplied and become even more visible. A third-generation JPG is even worse. This is why the recommendation when you're editing a photo is to only work on and change the original image (and use 'Save as', of course). Never work on a second or third-generation JPG - the smearing will become obvious quite quickly. How does this behaviour help when you're trying to identify edited photos? Imagine we have a JPG file, and we re-save it using our photo editing software to give two versions: the first generation and the second. We make no other changes - it's the same image at the same size. The two images will look very similar to the naked eye. Now we 'subtract' the second image from the first. The second compression will produce a set of data that's very close, but not exactly the same as the original. This means, in effect, that the subtraction of the pixel values will produce numbers close to, but not exactly zero. Since zero is black, we get a darkish image with random 'noise', and that randomness will be spread evenly across the difference image. Areas that encapsulate edges will be coloured differently, but still will show even, random noise.
FIGURE 1: A JPG photo saved directly from a RAW photo from a Canon Rebel XTi Figure 1 shows an original image (it was converted to JPG format from RAW) and Figure 2 the shows difference image created by comparing it with a second-generation copy. As you can see, it's just random noise, evenly spread throughout the image.
FIGURE 2: The Image Error Analysis image from the photo in Figure 1. Note the even, random noise What researcher Dr Neal Krawetz discovered is that, if the image is altered, the altered areas become much brighter in the difference image - there will be visible 'hot spots'. This happens because the alteration leaves artifacts in the pixel data, which are magnified by the compression process. Consider the workflow: you have a JPG, you make changes to it and save it (it is therefore a second-generation image). Krawetz's process then creates a third-generation image in order to calculate the difference. The changes show up more. At least that's the theory. In my own experiments (for example, cloning out the person in Figure 1), it's still hard to discern changes, Projects Editor Alex Cox asked me to try out this theory on some 'after' images he provided (see 'Spotting the fakes', below). All in all, forensic image analysis is in its infancy, with much work needed to better what sharp-eyed viewers can do. And it's an arms race: with Adobe Photoshop's automated tools for touching up photos, it's becoming harder and harder to spot the fakes. Spotting the fakes: Stourhead 1. Inspect the photo
This is lovely image showing a view of the changing autumn leaves at Stourhead in Wiltshire. My first thought is to see whether the reflections in the lake show something that's not in the rest of the photo. Has the editor cloned out some people, or removed a car from the photo, perhaps? Note that even though it's autumn, there are no leaves visible on the grass in the foreground, but there are some elsewhere. 2. Zoom in, if possible
If you have the image available in a large enough resolution, you can zoom in on areas of interest identified during the visual inspection. Here, for example, I can see that there's a strange-looking blue reflection in the lake by the ruin that's not matched by anything at the ruin. Also, coincidentally in the same area, there are some obvious masked-out splotches that might have been ducks on the water. 3. Use the JPG image error analysis tool
Make sure the photo is online, then go to http://errorlevelanalysis.com. I cropped part of the foreground to the right (the tool only accepts small photos) and fed it in to give the difference image above. The randomness isn't even - the grassy area has darker splotches (possible evidence of a cloning brush). Note the hot spots along the dividing line between water and land: something's been changed here too. Spotting the fakes: Pulteney Bridge 1. Inspect the photo
This is a shot of Pulteney Bridge in Bath. This time the reflections in the water aren't as valuable: the water is too turbulent. The most obvious edit here would be to remove some people, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps the changes (if any) are more subtle. Since it's a well-known landmark, I pulled up some images from Flickr to cross-check - has the editor removed or added anything architectural? 2. Zoom in
Having compared this image with another shot taken from the same angle, it seems that the building on the right has gained an extra window. Notice that when zoomed in, the added window (on the right) looks exactly like the real window (on the left). Notice another thing - the editor has copied just a bit too much of the wall: there is a speck of black to the left of the cloned window that's been duplicated from the drainpipe. 3. Zoom in again
My find on Flickr shows me there's been another, more subtle change. Just above the bridge roof on the right, in the distance, there should be a church tower. It's missing from the doctored photo, and at high magnification you can just see the edit. It must be noted, of course, that I shouldn't trust the Flickr photo either - it might have been edited too - but should find another image taken by someone else to double-check. 
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| Buying Guide: Best video editing software under £100 Posted: 21 May 2011 05:00 AM PDT However much fun you have shooting video, the real satisfaction comes later, when you bring it into your editing suite and turn hours of footage into something tight, special and genuinely watchable. You can throw together something acceptable with free software like Windows Movie Maker, but with the tools you'll find over the next few pages, you can make it look truly professional. Most video editors available at this price work in a similar way. You import your clips from whatever you shot or saved them on, arrange them in a storyboard view if you like, then jump into a multi-track timeline to handle the proper editing. You can link clips together with simple transitions like wipes and fades, and jazzier ones that you're usually better off avoiding. You can apply effects over the top of your individual clips, adding things like colour correction or the inevitable lens flare. Again, feel free to use the former, but keep experiments with the latter to yourself. However, just because packages are similar doesn't mean they're the same. Almost all of these tools include a few of their own unique features, and each of them puts its own spin on the process. Whether you want as many features as you can get your hands on, or a gentle introduction to video editing, we've got the right package for you. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 - £77
Even more than its Photoshop sibling, Premiere Elements' best feature is that you don't feel like you're missing out by not having the full version. At least, not in terms of raw features. From its automatic trimming tools to the superb organiser for managing your clips and photos, Premiere Elements offers everything you need to make your movies look better. Need to fix some shaky camera footage? No problem. Powerful timeline editors? It's got them all. You don't get some of the extras that other editors are offering, like 3D, but if there's a tool that you genuinely need, Adobe Premiere Elements 9 almost certainly offers it. Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily offer it very efficiently. This version of Premiere is surprisingly slow, and only gets slower as your projects become more ambitious. There's no CUDA support on offer, and it doesn't take much editing before the CPU strain starts to show. The strange thing is that instead of offering features to offset this, this version comes with very few new toys of interest. Being able to import from Flip cameras and DSLRs directly is certainly handy, but you'll probably never use the new feature to export finished movies to www.photoshop.com instead of YouTube, nor do much more than laugh at the deeply silly new filter that's meant to make your video look like a cartoon, but really makes it look ugly and over-posterised. The best addition is the boost to Premiere's audio options, offering extra filters devoted to cleaning up bad sound. It works fine, as long as you don't expect miracles. Elements has long been the package by which all other home video editors are judged. In terms of raw features, this is no exception. In execution though, it's hard not to feel like it's coasting a bit too much. Verdict: 3/5 Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 - £80
Corel's latest effort is a great demonstration of interface design in action. At first glance, it looks simple. In practice, all the options you need are there, sitting unobtrusively out of the way until you need them. For example, while both it and Roxio offer features to turn 2D footage into 3D, Roxio asks you to create a dedicated 3D project, and convert your files before inserting them. Corel just imports them as normal, but makes 3D an option at the export stage. It means a longer rendering time when you're done, but it gets you working on the timeline view that much faster. The basic workflow is excellent, with everything integrated onto the same screen, performance boosted by support for Cuda and Intel Core, upscaling included as standard, and - cue the sound of cheers if your PC is set up to take advantage - dual-monitor support. When the whole market is matched so closely in terms of raw functions, this is the kind of thing that can make all the difference. VideoStudio never loses sight of the fact that it's a mid-range product, but its focus on handy features like creating proxies for hefty files makes it very comfortable to use. The freedom to simply rip off a panel and have it floating free or docked wherever you want it really helps when you're settling down for an evening's serious editing. It's a particularly useful feature when you have a huge pile of media files to sort through, and having them in the same application is infinitely more convenient than them being hidden away in a separate organiser. Many of VideoStudio's effects are gimmicky, and there some disappointments like the limited number of tracks to work with, but there's little to complain about. It's an excellent package, no matter how you like to work. Verdict: 4.5/5 Nero Video Premium HD - £50
Nero proves that feel can matter just as much as sheer features in such a crowded market. It has most of the usual bases covered, and it's not that different in design from the others, but it feels much clumsier. It put a bad taste in our mouths even during the installation process by trying to install the pointless Ask.com toolbar, which is ridiculous for what's supposed to be a premium video editing package. Once we fired it up, the interface simply wasn't as pleasant to use as the other packages here. The problem isn't that it's simply Nero Multimedia Suite's video editor component per se, it's that it feels like it. Even though it is one of the cheapest editing tools in this test, at this price, we were expecting something sleeker. The same applies to the MediaHub app that comes along with it, which would be handy for file management on its own merits, but pales in comparison to others we've seen in this test - particularly Adobe's effort. In Nero's favour though, it does pack in plenty of effects to play with, especially when you factor in the bonus pack you get with the Premium HD version. That and Blu-ray support are the only differences between the two packs, and the price difference is only £10. Nero isn't the cheapest editor, but that's still a pretty good price. Just don't try to do a straight upgrade of Vision Xtra if you find that you need the feature in the future, since that will suddenly cost you a whopping £40. If there's a reason for that, we can't see it. Nero Video Premium HD is a perfectly adequate editor, but one without anything that excites or makes it stand out. It does the job, but so does all of its competition. As part of a suite, it would be - and indeed, is - perfectly fine. As the headline act though, it lacks star power. Verdict: 3/5 Serif MoviePlus X5 - £60
MoviePlus offers one of the smoothest introductions to video editing around, not simply because it's easy to use, but because it puts its instructions front and centre (or to be more exact, front and off to the left, but still very prominent). If you've never tried editing a video properly before, it's a step-by-step guide to all of the basics, and if you simply follow it, you won't go far wrong. In terms of core features, MoviePlus offers everything you'd expect, from Blu-ray burning to specific filters like image stabilisation and performance boosters like proxy-file generation for your high definition content. It doesn't bring anything radically new or different to the table though, and not all of its interface design is as helpful as the starter guide. Menus and options often feel clumsy compared to the competition, with weak media management. It's also somewhat strange that while it provides three sample projects, one of them is a snazzy but complicated demonstration of chroma keying, and the second shows how to fake tilt-shift effects. Some more samples along the lines of the third, which simply focuses on the selection of transitions and PIP effects, would seem much more in keeping with the product's overall style. The ability to move either panels or the main Preview window onto a second monitor is very handy, freeing up more space to work with the Timeline and make proper use of its support for unlimited tracks. You also get the ability to group your clips and effects, making it much easier to compartmentalise sections of your movie and work on large chunks in one fell swoop. MoviePlus might not be the most exciting editor on the market, but it remains a very capable one that handles the nuts and bolts just fine. Verdict: 3/5 Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 - £90
Compared to most of the suites on test, Vegas is a startlingly intimidating editor - at least at first glance. At this price, most interfaces are sleek, with clear options, and a wide array of wizards to guide you through the more complex features. Vegas is big, confusing, cluttered, and extremely unfriendly - even with its excellent interactive tutorials. As just one example of this, when you apply new effects, they're all controlled and stored in a pop-up window rather than being integrated comfortably into the main interface. To get away with this, a product has to pack some serious power - and while Vegas isn't as strong as it really needs to be, many of its features do exactly that. The majority that it offers are at least as good as its competition, with a few that surpass it - like the Secondary Color Corrector for fixing issues that simple tweaking and white balancing can't handle. With this, you can pick any colour in your video and shift it as much as you like - the tutorial demonstrates this by recolouring the yellow stripes in a bumblebee costume into pinks, greys and more, without affecting the other colours. Another unusually advanced option is a dedicated levels control, which lacks the graph you'd expect in an image editor, but works under the same principles. A few of the package's features let themselves down in odd ways though. The biggest disappointment is the video stabiliser effect. Technically it works, but it's far too crop-happy. When you finally learn where to find everything, you won't want for much. Vegas is powerful, and in its own way, efficient. However, unless you really need one of its unique features, or you feel like taking off the training wheels, it's hard to justify the hassle involved in using it. Verdict: 4/5 Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Collection 15 - £95
Pinnacle Studio is one of the most complete packages on test here, starting out well by offering a full sample project that lets you really see what you should be building towards. Where most simply offer tutorials and expect you to fill in the gaps, being able to see everything from chroma key to professional quality cutting in action is a great help if you're new to video editing. What really stands out is the high quality of the effects at your disposal. Montages, for instance, work like super-transitions, letting you import multiple clips into an animation (for instance, a pan over several Polaroids, or three vertical bars of clips that fade in and out, music video style) that look surprisingly good. The dedicated Effects corner offers several impressive tweaks that you can apply to your video, but by far the best is 'Looks'. This offers a range of post-production filters to make your video stand out, from the classic day-to-night effect to faking a tilt-shift and adding a dreamy look to your movie. There are a few minor irritations, including the small size of the preview window, a limited number of tracks, and the fact that while Pinnacle does offer dual-monitor support, it only stretches to letting you make the second monitor a full-screen preview. The fixed interface doesn't offer any scope for moving things around, and its media organisation tools are weak. However, nothing in this test does a better job of letting you play with the raw look and feel of your clips, making Pinnacle especially worth checking out if your video editing wish list extends to post-production. That does push the price up a bit though, because both the regular Studio 15 and Ultimate editions lack the 'Looks' plug-in and some of the other fancier filters. Verdict: 4/5 Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 - £80
Depending on which version you buy, PowerDirector starts out with either a very helpful performance boost or a bizarre missed opportunity. Buy the more expensive Ultra64 version and you get a specially written 64-bit version of the software, which is fast, efficient and effective. The regular Deluxe version, however, is 32-bit. There are reasons why you have to pay more for its Blu-ray support - expensive technology licenses have to be to be taken into account - but 64-bit support? If you don't burn Blu-rays, the extra £30 is a lot to swallow. It's a shame that this leaves such a sour taste in the mouth, because PowerDirector is a genuinely good tool. Along with the standard timeline editing mode, you get plenty of effects to play with, including video upsampling using the TrueTheater technology that we enjoyed so much in PowerDVD. It's best to have a clean clip to work with, and whether you're removing noise or boosting the video, it's not hard to crank it too high, but when it works, it's just what you need to make your videos look good. Finally, while not a unique feature, PowerDirector also comes with SmartSound to sort out background music for your movie if you don't have any on tap. You take a base tune, set a variation, then customise it to fit a set chunk of time. You get several pieces of music for free, with the option to buy more. All of these features are available regardless of whether you get Deluxe or Ultra64, with the only real boosts beyond the 64-bit support being the ability to handle Blu-ray discs. If you need those, the extra £30 is justifiable. If not, let's hope that Cyberlink sees sense for PowerDirector 10, makes 64-bit a standard option for everyone, and we all get a great bonus feature on top of an excellent product. Verdict: 4/5 Roxio Video Lab HD - £50
Unsurprisingly for an editor born of Roxio's Creator suites, Video Lab HD is one of the friendlier options for video editing. Fire it up and the majority of options are served up not as menus in a huge suite, but as simple options on a launcher menu. At its simplest, you don't need to worry about Roxio's dedicated editing screen at all. The software's built-in CineMagic Assistant reads in your files, slices them up into scenes and applies a theme to the ones you want to keep, including 'Party', 'Map' and 'Romance'. It's a good way to cut together a few scenes and get the flavour of a video in a minute or so without having to cut it together manually. Still, for anything remotely serious, you'll still be working with the standard storyboard and timeline views for most of the time. Both of these features work exactly as you'd expect, with a solid range of standard effects like basic fills, and a few more gimmicky ones like coin flip transitions and clouds. VideoLab's big selling feature though is that it can convert your footage into 3D - or import it directly, if you recorded it with a dedicated 3D camera. You'll find a pair of red/cyan analgyph glasses included with the pack for watching 3D video on your monitor, and you can also export the results in 'RealD' format for TVs. Importing 2D footage for conversion takes quite a while, but the result is reasonably effective - given the right clips, of course. Beyond these, all the other video editing features you'd expect are here, including Blu-ray authoring, footage stabilisation, easy importing of clips and handy tools for fixing footage. It's a very solid suite whether or not you're into its flashy 3D features, though they're what sets it apart from most of the other suits on test. Verdict: 4/5 You can't go too badly wrong here. These tools are almost all feature-packed, and while some perform better than others, they'll only grind slowly if you go crazy trying to get your money's worth out of features like 'unlimited' tracks or dozens of effects. We're reviewing specific versions here, but it's worth remembering that most of these tools are also available in at least one other version that costs less and lacks Blu-ray support (and usually a handful of bonus features that you're unlikely to miss, although check the details on their websites to make sure). If you don't have a Blu-ray burner and don't plan to upgrade soon, that's an easy saving before you start shopping around for cheaper deals. Editors Choice: Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 It's a close contest, and the main reason we've chosen Corel is its interface and ease of use rather than its feature set (for that, Pinnacle Studio takes the crown, if you're willing to swallow the extra cost of the Ultimate Collection). This was by far the most comfortable editor to use whatever your level of experience. Given how long editing takes, that means a lot. Value Award: Roxio Video Lab HD Not only is it one of the cheaper options, it comes with one of the year's most exciting new features - support for 3D. If you don't care about that, ignore those options entirely and enjoy a powerful, flexible editing suite that doesn't cost the Earth. If you do, break out your glasses or expensive TV and prepare to put your footage into a brand new dimension. 
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| Posted: 21 May 2011 04:00 AM PDT PDFs are the file format de rigueur for content-rich documents. From press releases and brochures to product manuals, PDFs are a great way of publishing documents that contain text, images, videos and websites. This is partly due to their relatively low file sizes, but also because you only need free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader X or Foxit Reader to view them. The fact that PDF documents are platform agnostic is bolstered by the ready availability of PDF plugins for all the major internet browsers. Acrobat X Pro is the latest top-of-the-range release from Adobe that contains all the tools you need to read, edit and create your own PDF documents. Even if you've never created a PDF before, the process is incredibly simple. You can convert documents that you've created in other applications into PDFs by right-clicking them and selecting 'Convert to PDF'. You can also scan documents for immediate conversion to PDF. While this is undeniably easy, you're missing out on some of the best features if it's all you use. The updates include integration with Microsoft SharePoint for collaborative PDF creations, an all-new Action Wizard that helps streamline and speed up the process of creating batches of PDFs, a commenting tool pane for easier note taking, and a new layout called Reading Mode that makes viewing and presenting PDFs easier. While these new features are welcome additions, they are hardly game-changing and don't make this an essential upgrade if you own an earlier version of Acrobat. All the programs and features are presented with the style, ease of use and reliability that we've come to expect from Adobe. It's struck a perfect balance, offering lots of choice without overwhelming users. You can use the wide array of integrated tools to create complex multimedia PDFs, or you can use your favourite programs to create the document, then let Acrobat X Pro convert it. The choice is yours, and the results can be fantastic. 
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| Posted: 21 May 2011 03:30 AM PDT Now that broadband internet has become better at handling larger uploads, online backup solutions have become a much more viable way to keep your most important files and documents safe. They don't require extra hardware, like external hard drives, and the files are kept in a remote location that will keep them safe if something happens to your PC – or even your home. A lot of online backup utilities offer a free version with limited space, with the option to purchase more space. This marketing model relies on users signing up for free, then being so impressed that they subscribe to get more space and extra features. Dropbox is one of the most popular online backup solutions, mainly because of its simplicity – you can back up and sync files by dragging and dropping them into the Dropbox folder. Now AVG, best known for its free antivirus software, has entered the ring with its own solution: Live Kive. Although reasonably easy to use, it's still a long way from Dropbox's intuitive interface. From the main page you can select how often you want to back up, when folders and their contents should be synchronised, and when designated files and folders are shared between your devices. Tabs along the top let you delve deeper into the settings, like which files and folders you want to save online. You can choose the save folders by category – like 'Music' or 'Documents' – or click 'Advanced' to select files or folders. Live Kive lacks the simplicity of Dropbox, but its comprehensive interface means you can tweak settings to create a backup plan that suits you perfectly. The interface also does a good job of being as straightforward, or as in-depth as you need. The free version gives you 5GB of storage space, while the paid-for versions give you 25GB or unlimited space. AVG Live Kive is a strong contender that's still in its early stages. The free version is well worth trying out, and with AVG behind it we're sure it will go from strength to strength. 
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| Review: Enermax Jazzmate EB211U3-B Posted: 21 May 2011 03:00 AM PDT Upgrading and replacing computers over the years can leave you with a stockpile of unused components. If you have an old hard drive lying around, then rather than leaving it to gather dust, you can put it to good use as an external hard drive. While there are already quite a few hard drive cases on the market that will accommodate an internal laptop hard drive, the Enermax Jazzmate stands out from the crowd thanks to some very handy features that its competitors have left out. The first thing you notice about the case is how small it is - not much bigger than the 2.5-inch hard drives it can hold. This turns it into a very useful portable drive that you can carry around with you without much trouble. The casing is so much smaller than the other hard drive enclosures you'll come across because of its 'Cooling Plus' mesh design, which allows air to flow freely through the case, efficiently cooling the drive. Another nice feature of this case is that you don't need to screw or unscrew anything. You simply unlock the case, slide off the top and place your hard drive inside. It's so simple to add and remove hard drives that you can swap them at will – ideal if you have a number of otherwise unused drives going spare. Adding hard drives couldn't be easier, and it only took a couple of seconds to fit a hard drive, close the case, plug it into the computer and then access the files. Even better, the Enermax Jazzmate comes with a USB 3.0 cable. Plugging this into a USB 3.0 port gives fantastic speeds, almost comparable with internal drives. The price is impressive as well – if you've already got a spare hard drive you can have a fully functioning large capacity external drive for only £20. If your laptop refuses to boot, this is a very affordable way of recovering your files – just take out the drive, insert it into the Jazzmate and connect it to a working PC. 
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| Tutorial: How to spot suspicious processes in Windows 7 Posted: 21 May 2011 03:00 AM PDT Windows 7 is a big operating system with an efficient architecture, but its inner world of processes and services can be a confusing place if you're not used to it. If you don't know what you're looking at, it's easy for malware to masquerade as a legitimate process and for legitimate processes to frighten you so much that you kill them, crash the system and lose data. Then there's the problem of your anti-malware protection or Windows popping up warnings about processes needing your permission to access resources. Will accepting the request infect your machine, or worse? Hierarchy of processes To work out whether a process is benign or malicious, it's useful to understand something about the structure of a running installation of Windows 7. After you power up the PC and it passes its self-tests, the BIOS loads the master boot record from the primary hard disk partition and runs it. This in turn loads and runs the Windows 7 kernel image, which then begins unpacking the other processes it needs help it create all the processes that constitute the OS. All modern operating systems have a hierarchy of processes. In Windows 7, there are usually three or four top-level processes. One such process is called 'wininit', the direct descendent (the process it personally starts running) of which is called 'services.exe'. As you might expect, it's the job of this process to spawn child processes that run as independent services in the background. However, there's often a degree of confusion that creeps into the user's mind over this seemingly simple task. The confusion is that 'services. exe' starts multiple instances of a process called 'svchost.exe'. Search for the term and you'll find many forum posts from worried users asking if their PC has been taken over by malware and asking how to kill all those multiple processes. However, it's normal to have many instances running in parallel, and killing them can harm the running OS. If this happens, you'll need to reboot and may lose data or even corrupt your hard disk. The reason there are so many instances of 'svchost.exe' is that it acts as a launcher for processes that run from DLLs rather than EXE files. These are apportioned between many instances of 'svchost.exe' for efficiency, speed and system resilience. 'Services.exe' also starts many other service processes that run directly from EXE files. These include the service portion of your anti-malware products, updaters for third-party products and Windows 7, and services for power management and the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant Manager. Another process that causes confusion and fear in the minds of users is the innocent 'Search Indexer.exe'. When the hard disk light stays lit for prolonged periods of time, it's normal to worry about what's going on, but it's usually down to this benign and useful part of Windows 7. It simply indexes all your files for use in Windows Search. Its index is used when you type in the name of a file in the Start Menu search box and when you search for files in Explorer. It's even used by Windows 7's Libraries feature. Another vital top-level process is 'explorer.exe'. This process runs the Windows 7 desktop and is the mother process for all your running applications, including those that sit in the system tray of the task bar, ready for use. Improving the view Traditionally, processes, services and applications are viewed using Task Manager. In Windows 7, it's started by pressing [Ctrl]+[Alt]+ [Del], then selecting it from the menu. Task Manager sorts full applications, underlying system processes and services into three tabs, but it doesn't show you everything. Where are all those 'svchost.exe' processes? Task Manager hides a lot from you, and when you're investigating system activity, this limited view of what's going on is to be avoided.
Instead, a better option is to download and run our old friend Process Explorer, available from Windows Sysinternals author Mark Russinovich. Process Explorer needs no installation. Simply unzip the archive and drag the files into a convenient directory. To run Process Explorer, right-click its icon and select 'Run as administrator'. Starting in this way gives Process Explorer more access to important information. Click 'Yes' on the 'User account control' window that pops up. If you're running on a 64-bit CPU, you'll notice that a second executable suddenly appears in the directory containing Process Explorer. This is called 'procexp64', and is a wrapper that the original 32-bit executable creates to satisfy conditions for running on a 64-bit machine. It's a temporary file and should disappear when you close the running program, though you might have to press [F5] to refresh the directory to see this. Process Explorer works the same in 32-bit and 64-bit environments. It provides far more detail than Task Manager, and it can manage tasks just as well as the Windows 7 offering. To begin, click the 'Process' column until the display changes to an indented hierarchy. This makes it easy to see which processes are the parents of others. 'Wininit', for example, is the ancestor of a large number of processes, including those multiple instances of 'svchost.exe'. Now we have a better view of the running OS, we can begin to look for malicious processes masquerading as legitimate ones. With all those svchost processes running, it's relatively easy for malware to call itself something that will look like 'svchost' to the untrained eye. For example, it might call itself 'svch0st.exe' (with a zero), 'svhost.exe' (without the 'c'), or any other combination of letters and numbers that attempt to subtly resemble the original file name. These are all malicious impostors. To make it easier to spot such files, you can click the 'Process' column heading until you get an alphabetical listing. To get more details of any process, double-click it. You can verify that the process hasn't been tampered with or infected by malware by selecting the 'Image' tab. Next to the process's icon are the words 'Not verified'. Clicking the 'Verify' button verifies the image against a stored signature. Process Explorer uses the running process to generate its own signature and compares the two. If they match, it changes the text to read 'Verified'. When verifying images, pay particular attention to processes that have no entry in the 'Company name' column, those whose description is blank or meaningless, and those whose name is a jumble of letters. If verifying the image of a seemingly legitimate process produces the message 'Unable to verify', don't panic. It's likely that the manufacturer isn't a verified signer of images. Some very old software, like Microsoft Office 2000, has no signature to check, which will lead to an 'Unable to verify' message.
For cases like this, Process Explorer also has a handy feature for checking the validity of any running process by using the knowledge of the wider community of Windows 7 users. Right-click a suspicious process and select 'Search Online'. Your web browser will then open and Process Explorer will perform an online search. One particularly good, authoritative source of information for each process is www.processlibrary.com. If this site is not in the search results, using Google Search, you can add the phrase 'site:www.processlibrary.com' to the end of the search term to just return results from that site. Another good way of verifying that a process is malware is to examine the path leading to its executable. By double-clicking on a suspicious process and clicking the 'Image' tab, you can see the full path to the executable, the options used to start the process, and the working directory it uses.
System directories in Windows 7 are all well protected by default, so any malware will have to use a temporary directory outside of the system area. Any process that isn't an application you've started (or a service related to an application you've installed) and which shows a path or working directory outside of the C:\Windows directory tree should be treated as possible malware, especially ones that use the 'Temp' directory. Spying on spyware Discovering what a suspicious process connects to, if anything, is a good way of deciding whether it's malicious. If a botnet client has infected your computer, it'll need to phone home to receive orders on a regular basis, for example. In Process Explorer, double-click the suspicious process, then click the 'TCP/IP' tab. To convert the IP addresses listed into DNS names, ensure that the 'Resolve Addresses' tick box is selected. Note down any unknown sites and search for them online. Many of the processes you interrogate in this way will be listening to the local machine. You can tell because rather than the local or remote address being an external DNS name, both will be your PC's name, a colon, and the port number. Many processes use ports to communicate locally; it's nothing to worry about. Sometimes normal processes can go wild and suddenly take nearly 100 per cent of the CPU time. If you have a dual core processor or better, you can still access the system and kill the process using Process Explorer. It's a good idea to keep Process Explorer open in the background for a few days to get a feel for what's normal for your PC based on your typical usage. You'll see your anti-malware update itself, discover what uses most CPU, see which applications hog your memory and much more. You can also add columns to the display by right-clicking a column heading and selecting 'Select columns'. The range of columns covers memory, disk and network use, threads, DLLs and even .NET components. 
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| Review: HIS Multi-View II USB Display Adaptor Posted: 21 May 2011 02:30 AM PDT While a lot of modern graphics cards offer extra DVI, HDMI and VGA display ports for attaching extra monitors to a PC, most laptops and smaller computers lack this functionality. If you already have a multiple-monitor setup, then the number of monitors you can connect to your PC will be limited by the number of available display ports and the power of your graphics card. The HIS Multi View II is a solution to these problems. It's a display adaptor that plugs into a PC's USB socket and provides an additional VGA or DVI socket for adding another monitor. It's a small device that can be carried around in its supplied case, and it connects to a laptop or computer via a retractable USB lead, allowing you position the monitor with ease. Just because the monitor is plugged into the computer via USB doesn't mean there's much of a compromise when it comes to image quality. Even plugged into the USB adaptor, monitors capable of very high resolutions are still able to reach 2,048 x 1,152, which far more than most monitors are capable of. The HIS Multi-View II USB Display Adaptor boasts of its gaming credentials on its box, though there is a certain amount of lag when playing through the adaptor. The lag can also be noticeable when playing high-definition video content, with dropped frames causing choppy playback. Despite claims to the contrary, the HIS Multi-View II USB Display Adaptor isn't really suitable for playing games. Instead, it offers the chance to expand the workspace on your laptop, and is ideal for presentations and browsing the web. It offers a lot of flexibility for the price, especially if you already have an extra monitor going spare. If not, you might be better off waiting for the new generation of small portable monitors that can be plugged straight into a USB port – and which can be powered directly from it. 
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