Recently two of my friends, Ram from Teknobites and Kanak from Tecfre had problems with their posts getting copied by other blogs. The blog has copied the content word by word and also linked the images directly with the original blog. Stealing content and images is actually a very serious problem and there are many ways to tackle them.

I did a search on how to protect hotlinking of images from your blogs and found this plugin- HotLink Protection for Wordpress blogs. Although its possible to set rules in .htaccess and enable hotlinking protection, for normal Wordpress users these may be complicated.

This plugin is very simple to use. Upload the plugin and activate it in Plugins. In the options tab, you set the path of the file for which hotlink protection is required.

Most of us use desktop Email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird etc to check POP3 and IMAP email accounts. If you are out of Office or out of home or if you do not want to install the client software, here are few ways to check your POP3/IMAP email accounts Online.

1. Mail2Web: Mail2Web provides a free web-based email retrieval application that allows users from anywhere to anonymously pick up their email from almost any POP3 and IMAP4 email server. No registration is required to access or use the application. Retrieving mails and sending them are very easy with Mail2web.

Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the popular, safe and fast email clients which is pretty easy to use as well. Just like Firefox, Thunderbird also support a vast number of Add-ons. Listed here are the Top 5 useful add-ons for Mozilla Thunderbird.

1. Contact Sidebar: Contact Sidebar displays all available address books in a sidebar in the 3-pane-window of Thunderbird. It makes all your contacts easy accessible from the main window to quickly write messages, or to edit the properties of a contact card. It also allows you to drag & drop files and messages to a contact to easily add attachments to a new message to this contact.

One of important problems with passwords is that because we have the tendency of forgetting them, we land up creating some easy password which are prone to be hacked. Its important that our password has enough security as well as its easy to remember.

Here are few simple tips for creating a good password;

Never use your personal information as password- Most of the people have the tendency of using the personal information like date of birth, name, telephone numbers, pet name etc as passwords. Its easy for hackers to get your personal information.
Do not use actual words- Never use actual or real words as passwords, because they are the ones prone to be hacked. In internet world there are lots of tools and softwares for hackers to get the passwords, so its always better to have a combination of words, unless the word itself is long.

Windows Live Folders which was launched recently was available only in selected regions previously. Microsoft is expanding the beta for Windows Live Folders. I was able to access Live folders today morning. This is available only for a limited time as they are not ready to expand to additional markets.

The folders are available in three categories- Personal Folders, Shared Folders and Public Folders. The size of folders is 500MB at present. This may be small when compared to other services, but hopefully Microsoft will increase it as soon as it comes out of beta.