cache

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical network that resolves text-based URLs such as "www.cnet.com" to the servers' IP addresses that your computer uses for communication. While loading a single Web page or other Web-based resource, your computer may contact numerous URLs to load different components (a Web page, images on it, an application hosted on it, scripts, etc.), so a robust DNS service is a vital part of having a smooth Internet connection.

Even though a fast DNS service will optimize a connection, redundant queries to it will take time to complete. Therefore, based … Read more

NEW ORLEANS--Paying for goods or services at the checkout counter with your phone is the holy grail of mobile payments, something Google, the credit card companies, and the wireless providers are all trying to figure out.

But until that goes mainstream, startup iCache has a pretty novel approach for people who want to leave their wallet at home. The company's Geode product acts as both an iPhone cover and digital wallet, while packing a single programmable smart card.

It works like this: a user enters in their debit and credit card information through an included mag stripe reader, which … Read more

Tidy Up is tool that can help you reduce hard-drive clutter by identifying duplicate files on any mounted disk. This utility's multipane interface has a bit of a learning curve, despite its new "Basic Mode," and the app's comprehensive search criteria and system of smart and manual "baskets" may not be immediately intuitive to casual users.

Anyone who spends time getting familiar with Tidy Up and its three- step approach, however, will find that it's a powerful tool for identifying and dealing with duplicate files, whether you want to delete them, move them, … Read more

It's always exciting when you bring home a new computer. It feels so powerful and fast; you can't imagine ever needing to buy another one again. Unfortunately, neither your excitement nor your PC's performance lasts.

Whether your hard drive is running out of space or your system takes forever to run simple tasks, it might be worth your time to try and revive it before replacing it. Here are some spring cleaning tips to revive your Windows PC:

Free up disk space The enormous size of modern multimedia files can eat up your hard-drive storage quickly. What … Read more

Safer downloads and a cautious expansion of site pre-caching land in Chrome 17 today, continuing Google's two-tiered approach to browser speed and user safety.

Google Chrome 17 stable for Windows (download), Mac (download), Linux (download), and Chrome Frame includes a number of new extension APIs and security fixes.

As revealed in the Chrome 17 beta version, Chrome's safe browsing technology will now scan downloads as well as Web sites. It looks for known malware files, and it analyzes installation files starting with Windows-based EXE and MSI. Google hasn't clarified if the scan will later include other Windows-based … Read more

The memory in your system, commonly referred to as RAM, is the work space the system uses to store executable code and loaded data. If your system is slowing down then you may be low on RAM. Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

If you open up the Activity Monitor utility on your system and go to the Memory section, you can see a pie chart of the system's physical memory usage, where generally the larger the … Read more

The Sri Lankan branch of Anonymous claims to have hacked into the DNS servers of Symantec, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and several other large organizations over the past few days.

Posting the news and records of its exploits on Pastebin, the group is taking credit for launching "DNS Cache Snoop Poisoning" attacks against its victims.

DNS cache snooping is the process whereby hackers can query a DNS server to find out which domain names are being resolved into IP addresses.

DNS cache poisoning is a method through which hackers are able to insert malicious and fake records into the … Read more

If you're looking for a Mac uninstaller with a little extra under the hood, CleanApp offers all the features you need to get rid of unwanted apps once and for all.

With CleanApp, you drag and drop apps to the interface, and then you can view them and their associated files before you decide what to do. But unlike other uninstall utilities for Mac, CleanApp offers a few extras across the top of the interface, so you can zero in on what you want to uninstall. The Applications button displays all installed apps; a System Accessories button lets you … Read more

A few people are noticing after installing Lion that Safari may render fonts in Web sites incorrectly, and show some or all of the text as a series of square blocks with the capital letter A in them. When testing the problem in other browsers, such as Firefox, the sites appear fine. The problem does not happen to all Web sites, but instead seems to crop up only for specific ones, indicating an issue with how the rendering of specific HTML or styling code is being interpreted for those sites.

Users who have had this problem have tried resetting Safari … Read more