SysInternals Shift to One Microsoft Way, Redmond

When former Dr. Dobb's columnists and Windows Kernel experts - Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell - formed a company called "NT Internals" (as in "Windows NT"), Microsoft objected to their use of the NT moniker and so they had to change the company name to Sysinternals and Winternals.

Ironically, Microsoft today acquired Sysinternals and Winternals, that are the brains behind some of the best free utilities for Windows like Process Explorer, FileMone and Regmon.

This is probably an exciting development for Microsoft and the entire Windows community - the software tools will gain better visibility and acceptance once they are available on the Microsoft Download Center and the system utilites may eventually be integrated with the upcoming Windows Vista OS.

Russinovich is the same expert who discovered the infamous rootkit software distributed with Sony CDs for which Sony was titled the Worst Company of the Year 2006 by PCWorld.

While most of the Sysinternals utilities are expected to survive in the future, Microsoft may not be very pleased with the BlueScreen Screen Saver that mocks the BSOD famous in previous version of Microsoft Windows.

Video Tour of Sysinternals Tools & Utilities

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include Gmail Mail Merge (send personalized emails with Gmail ), Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and File Upload Forms ( receive files in Google Drive). Also see Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

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