27 Free Conference Call Services to Simplify your Life

Until recently conference calls were used mostly in the business environment, since it was quite expensive and required a certain level of justification for the management. But it is available to anyone for any reason. Why you might need that? Have you ever arranged family or classmates’ reunion, when all the participants are from different cities, and each one of them has personal problems and scheduling preferences? No? It is a lot of fun. After multiple phone calls back and forth, bulk emails, flooding your email account, and number of text messages you realize, that you want just to be alone. I have a better solution for you. Conference call will allow collecting all the participants at the same time, where the mutually accepted schedule and other related decisions can be reached instantly. The only charges associated will be charges for local or long-distance calls to the preset phone number, offered by the features service.

Video Tutorial below will give you an example how easy the conference call can be arranged through one of the free services FreeConferenceCall.com.

Free Conference Calls with FreeConferenceCall.com

But, it is just an example of one of the suitable services. For your convenience, I have prepared a Rating List with 20 Top services, providing free conference calls for their members. In same offers, there is no need even to register for the hosting Web Site.

You can access the listing with brief description, site link, and rating:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-25999-conference-calls--free-services.aspx

Did I mentions, that it is free of charge?

Advanced Free Media Editor Suite- AVIARY

As you might already notice, the modern trend is related to transfer some of the desktop software responsibilities, which were traditionally associated with computer-installed programs, online. You have online text editors, translators, PDF creators, fax generators, and more. One more area of the stand-alone software utilities is coming to Internet.

Aviary (http://aviary.com/ a new online service (in beta) that lets its members edit and create images (and videos in the nearest future) online with no need for additional software installed on the PC. Eventually, Aviary will ultimately be a suite of 18 media tools, with major accent on image editing. The idea is to provide online collaboration capabilities to the users. The main application in the suite - Phoenix - is an image editing system, reminding famous Photoshop as to the spec of the overall capabilities. It includes layers, color adjustments, and a host of drawing and selection manipulation tools. This is powerful software that will fill the needs of beginners and expert users.

Aviary is a Web 2 oriented suite, as users can leave comments on other’s works, follow them as fans and supporters, and save their profiles as favorites.

During the beta, Aviary is free. You have to sign up using your email address to receive a beta invitation.

Website: http://aviary.com/

Apps are available for both iPhone and Android smartphones.

Steganography: How to Hide Secret Information inside JPG Image Files?

Last year, there were several publications in press that al-Qaeda operatives were sending out encrypted messages to the terrorist groups members by hiding them inside digital photographs on eBay. While there no definite proof that this claim is justified, it is quite easy to hide any other file or group of files inside a JPEG image. You can place video clips, pdf, mp3, Office documents, zipped files, webpage or any other file format without special software and encoding knowledge. Any stranger that will get the image and will open it in either a photo editing software or as a thumbnail inside Windows Explorer, there will be no visible indication that the open file is more than just a regular image.

Let’s learn this simple trick, available with tools embedded in Operating System.

Step 1: Choose the secret file or groups of files, you want to embed in the image. For multiple files, compress them in a single archive with locking password if needed additional level of the data security.

Step 2: Select any image JPG file, where your data will be hidden.

Step 3: For simplifying the application, move the two files (data file and image file) directly on the root of your main drive C:

Step 4: Open Command Prompt (Start - All Programs - Accessories - Command Prompt).

Step 5: Type in the DOS-like window “cd \” to get to the drive, where the files moved on the step 3.

Step 6: Type “copy /B original.jpg + secretfiles.zip new.jpg”, where “original.jpg” represents the image file, you are planning to use as your data safe, “secretfiles.zip” (or any other data, video, audio, or text file) is the archive or file you are going to hide, and new image file with hidden information “new.jpg”. The “/B” stands for binary, just for your information. By adding this mark, you copy the secret data in binary mode onto the end of the new JPG image. When the picture is opened, the JPG header says the length of the data and ignores everything below (the hidden data). So, the only difference between the original and the new image files will be in the file size.

The new file with secretly attached information is ready to be sent or stored for future use. Recovering the original data is pretty easy. If inside is archive (ZIP), rename the new image from extension JPG to extension ZIP, and open with any compatible archiving program. If your file is TXT, you can rename it to text format or just open the “new.jpg” file with text editor.

For those, who like Video Tutorials, the following clips will be helpful:

HOW TO STORE/HIDE A ZIP/RAR IN AN IMAGE FILE. - More amazing videos are a click away

If you have no interest doing the procedure of the Steganography yourself, you can use free services from the following Web Site, where you get the output file automatically: http://www.steganography.computersniffer.com/

Additional Reading:

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-hide-secret-documents-or.html

http://www.techsnack.net/how-to-hide-important-information-in-an-image-file