names

When the government seizes a dope dealer's car, it can put the auto up for auction. But what happens when agents seize a Web domain?

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said today that those sites seized for trafficking in counterfeit and pirated goods will now serve to help spread the government's message that "unfairly devalue America's contributions, compromise American jobs, and put consumers, families, and communities at risk."

The Obama administration and the U.S. Congress have declared war on online piracy and law enforcement agencies have seized more than 100 sites in the past year. Of those, 65 domain names now direct visitors to a public service announcement. … Read more

OS X supports a number of different languages, and either during installation or in the system preferences you can choose your default language in which to have the system display localized elements such as menu text and dialogue text. In addition to interface elements, Apple supports localization on some system files and folders, including the default folders in the home directory. This means that if you switch your system's language, the names Desktop, Movies, Pictures, Documents, and so on that are in your home directory should also be shown in the new language.

While this works for most people, … Read more

While the launch services in OS X use file name extensions to associate files with various applications, generally users do not need to interact with these extensions and the system keeps them hidden by default; however, you can have the extensions shown, either globally or for specific files. If you edit the extension the system should prompt you for confirmation and then change the extension, but sometimes the system may revert the file name back or continually append the old file name to the new one.

For example, if you have a script file such as a JavaScript routine that … Read more

Companies agonize over what to name a product, and we certainly recognize how difficult a process it is to come up with a good name.

Over the years, we've seen lots of good ones: the Palm Pilot, the Motorola Razr, TiVo, the Flip cam, are just a few.

But today we're not here to celebrate success. No, let us to rejoice in failure and admire some of the truly bad -- and, in some cases, truly awful -- names that have come along in the last 10 years or so, including the latest additions to the list: the Asus FonePad/PadFone, Grace Digital Ecoxgear Ecoxbt, I'm Watch, Nintendo Wii U, and Qi inductive charging. … Read more

This awkwardly named utility (now known as "Better Rename" in the Mac App Store) can be extremely useful in some very specific situations. Anyone who needs to rename large batches of files on a daily basis--especially Web developers and anybody working with lots of photos or audio files--should definitely check out A Better Finder Rename. Most of what this app does can also be done with the Finder and Automator, but nowhere near as quickly nor as easily.

ABFR offers a huge number of renaming options, everything from modifying text and adding sequence numbers to changing formats and … Read more

In the classic Mac OS, colon characters were used to separate folders in a file path, but in Unix-based systems the folder separator is a forward slash character. These characters are prevented from being used in file names because it would confuse the system when trying to access the file. When Apple developed OS X, the use of the forward slash was adopted because of its Unix underpinnings, so in OS X you cannot include a true forward slash in a file name.

This may cause some confusion, since in the Finder you can rename files to include a forward … Read more

Like many free applications, The Hat from Harmony Hollow Software uses software to do something usually done "the hard way." In this case, it's drawing names from a hat, the time-honored method for randomly selecting individual entries from a group. The app can randomize a list of names so no one can complain about who goes first and who goes last. It can also draw individual names or pairs of names for raffles, sweepstakes, and ongoing contests. It does this all without requiring you to actually write down names, cut up the list, and throw it all … Read more

Windows indexes your computer's files, folders, and drives to speed up searches, but to really exploit the power of indexing, you need a dedicated indexing and search tool, preferably one that's fast, powerful, and easy to use. Free would be nice, too. Index Your Files fits the job description. It searches by date, size, Boolean operators, file extension, and more. It finds stuff fast not only by filtering searches but also by searching only those indexed databases you specify. You can create and search as many databases as you need.

Index Your Files is easy to use, but … Read more

Though it's in hot water with the U.S. government, WikiLeaks is being supported by online activists fighting to keep the site alive.

WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a … Read more