Software : Downloads: Download of the day: TunnelBear

---

• Downloads: Download of the day: TunnelBear
• One size fits all with screen-scaling Gmail app update
• Round up: The best free anti-spyware and anti-malware software 2016
• Round up: The best free PDF to Word converter 2016
• Round up: The best free VPN service 2016

Downloads: Download of the day: TunnelBear Posted: Download of the day - Tunnelbear TunnelBear is a superb free secure virtual private network (VPN) service that redirects your internet data via secure connections called 'tunnels'. These link your PC to a remote server, giving the impression that you're browsing from that location. TunnelBear has servers located throughout Europe, Asia and North America. Why you need it TunnelBear makes it impossible for unscrupulous advertisers and would-be hackers to find your IP address and physical location, and lets you avoid regional censorship and other content blocking. It can also boost your connection speed by circumventing any throttling implemented by your ISP – ideal for faster streaming. Its connections use secure 256-bit encryption protects your personal information from prying eyes, and the service doesn't log any of your online activity. What sets TunnelBear apart from other free VPN services is its ease of use. There's no need to tinker with proxy settings – simply install it, select a remove server location, flick the switch, wait for it to connect and you're ready to start browsing the web securely and anonymously. In addition to its desktop app, which redirects all your internet traffic via your chosen tunnel, TunnelBear is available as an extension for Chrome that only tunnels data sent via your browser, as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android. Key features Secure servers in 20 locations AES 256-bit encryption Supports up to five devices Multi-platform Works on Windows Vista, XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 Mac OS X Android iOS Price Free – 500MB data per month US$7.99 (about £6, AU$10) per month – unlimited data US$49.99 (about £38, AU$70) annually – unlimited data

One size fits all with screen-scaling Gmail app update Posted: Gmail for your phone is getting a significant update later this month, one which may save you a trip or two to the opticians in the long run. September will see the roll out of responsive design in the Gmail app, which will let emails be rescaled automatically to better fit the size of the screen of the device you're using. Most email is currently formatted with a computer's larger screen in mind, and the current Gmail build pretty much sends any rich-media information accompanying an email as-is. The new update will intelligently adapt an email to your device, saving you from squinting at tiny text, or tapping away at miniscule links. Intelligent inbox "These changes will make your email experience as comfortable and intuitive as possible," reads a post on the Google blog. "And as responsive design becomes more common, you'll continue to see emails that fit better on all your screens and devices." The update will also be rolling out to Inbox, Google's forward-thinking new take on mobile email management. How to be awesome at email

Round up: The best free anti-spyware and anti-malware software 2016 Posted: The best anti-spyware and anti-malware software The best spyware and malware protection Using an internet-connected PC without anti-spyware and anti-malware protection is rather like walking through the bad bit of town covered in bling, waving big wads of notes around and shouting "I am very bad at fighting!" Luckily you don't need to have big wads of notes to ensure that you don't get ripped off through your router or mugged via modem: as we'll discover in our feature, there are plenty of seriously good PC protection apps that you can get for absolutely nothing. As with any free software, pay close attention to the installers: some apps really want you to install bundled software, and they often do so by making installer screens really misleading in the hope that you'll just merrily click okay to everything. Given that the whole point of these apps is to remove unwanted software from your system, trying to stuff unwanted apps into your PC is a bit off. For more information, see our guide to avoiding potentially unwanted programs (PUPs). Have we missed an anti-spyware program that's saved your system? Let us know in the comments below. 1. BitDefender Antivirus Free Edition Discreet protection from malware, spyware and online security threats BitDefender is the strong, silent type. It doesn't even ask questions when you install it. What it does instead is use a range of tactics to identify bad things. It has B-Have, which looks for apps behaving badly; link scanning to identify cons; proactive virus scanning that can detect threats nobody has encountered before; and boot scanning every time you start your PC. Ad-free, nag-free and hassle-free, it's a great product that runs quickly and silently while you get on with something more interesting. Its comprehensive suite of tools to protect your PC makes BitDefender our top pick. Read on to discover nine more of the best free anti-spyware and anti-malware programs. 2. Panda Free Anti-Virus 2016 Cloud-based security that takes the pressure off your PC We're big fans of Panda's security products, and Panda Free Anti-Virus 2016 is smarter than ever before. It's cloud-based, with all the heavy lifting happening on Panda's servers - so the load on your PC is lessened considerably. As ever there are paid products that offer more features - Wi-Fi scanning, password management, encryption, parental controls and so on - but Panda offers excellent real-time protection and is ridiculously simple to use. If your PC is a little underpowered, Panda could be the anti-spyware and anti-malware tool for you. 3. AVG Anti-Virus Free 2016 A simple interface and effective scanning with remote activation If you prefer software that keeps quiet, be warned - AVG Anti-Virus Free 2016 is quite vocal with its notifications, and irks us from time to time with pop-ups telling us we've done something fantastic with regard to our online safety. As an anti-spyware and anti-malware app, though, it's very good. The dashboard is user-friendly, there's protection not just from downloadable threats, but from dodgy links too, and you can use your mobile to scan your PC remotely, which is pretty clever. The paid-for Pro model has more security options - it has more robust download protection, offers data encryption includes a firewall - but the free version offers decent protection for most PC users. 4. Ad-Aware Free Anti-Virus+ All the anti-malware and anti-spyware essentials, but lacks phishing protection Like many security software firms, Lavasoft offers its Ad-Aware Free Anti-Virus+ software in a free version in the hope you'll upgrade to its paid-for products - so it doesn't have some of the more advanced features you'd pay money for, such as phishing protection, parental controls and a digital file shredder. What it does have, however, more than covers the essentials: it scans downloads, checks for spyware, offers safe browsing via a list of known malicious websites and has a game mode so security notifications don't interrupt your frag-fests. Not bad for no money. 5. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware An excellent tool, but the free edition lacks real-time protection You can use MalwareBytes Anti-Malware free for as long as you like, but there's an important caveat: real-time protection, the fast 'hyper scan' mode and malicious website blocking features all expire after 14 days - and that means you're missing out on some of the program's best features. MalwareBytes has a deserved reputation for destroying malware and spyware that other programs miss, and its chameleon technology - which once again expires after a fortnight in the free version - means it's less susceptible to attacks that deliberately target security software. Think of the free version as a short-term savior or a test drive; the Premium version costs £19.95 (about US$29.15, AU$38.32) per year. 6. SpyBot Search and Destroy An anti-malware and anti-spyware stalwart that's ideal for diagnosing infections SpyBot Search and Destroy is a veteran of the malware wars, dating back to the first adware in 2000, and while it doesn't scan for viruses - that's in the Home version, which is $13.99 (about £10, AU$20) - the free version does a decent job of finding and fixing adware, malware and spyware. It's more of a system repair tool than a system protection tool, however, and you need to be careful where you get it from: there are fake versions in circulation which are designed to cause damage, not fix it. 7. Avast Free Anti-Virus 2016 A comprehensive package with built-in password management Avast is another old-timer, and has been protecting Windows from malware and spyware since PCs were made of wood. Avast Free Anti-Virus 2016 is the lightest, fastest version the company has ever shipped (the bad old days of security software slowing your PC to a crawl are thankfully long gone) and it supplements the anti-malware protection with a nifty password manager and home network monitoring, which can identify weak points in your Wi-Fi. As with most free products, not all the goodies are available for nothing, so for example if you want anti-phishing protection or spam filtering you'll need the paid-for version, but the free edition is still a very comprehensive security package. 8. Emsisoft Emergency Kit A lifesaver if your PC is already infected, but not a preventative tool Most security software tries to stop malware and spyware getting onto your system. Emsisoft Emergency Kit doesn't: it's the 911 call of security software, the app you use when your PC's been poked by something unpleasant. It's designed to be portable, an app you carry around with you on a USB stick, and its system requirements are tiny: just 200MB of RAM, so it'll run quite happily on any PC with 1GB or more system memory. With 2 million malware signatures, Emisoft Emergency Kit can restore almost any infected PC to rude health. 9. HijackThis For experts only - get detailed reports on a misbehaving PC Originally developed by Trend Micro and now available via SourceForge, HijackThis isn't an app for the faint of heart or tech-phobic: it generates an exceptionally detailed report on your system, enabling you to spot potential problems and malicious software. It's very fast and very thorough, but it's about malware and spyware methods rather than specific products. It tells you what's going on and it's your job to interpret it and take action. In the wrong hands, that power could be disastrous. This is one for experienced users only. 10. SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition An outdated interface belies a solid manual malware scanner Not just anti-spyware - SUPER anti-spyware. Does it live up to the name? Yes and no. SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition lacks real-time protection and scheduled scanning, so it's a tool you need to remember to run manually, and the interface appears to have been designed in the dark by maniacs. The core product is a solid one though, with lots of scanning options for picking up malware and spyware, registry repair, behavioural scanning and daily threat updates. It's not super, but it's pretty good.

Round up: The best free PDF to Word converter 2016 Posted: Convert PDFs to Word format Convert PDFs to Word documents If the precise formatting and fonts of a document are essential, PDF is the perfect format. It requires nothing more than a competent PDF reader for documents to display precisely; everything's packaged in and ready to go. Which is all lovely until you need to extract some of that information. PDFs, if you're using software like Adobe Reader, are usually a one-way street, consigning you to look and not touch. Unless you possess the original document used to generate the PDF in the first place, editing is going to be out of your reach. Or is it? We're here to look at the solution: PDF to Word converters. These tools will analyse PDF files, extract the text and images, and make the best stab they can at creating a Microsoft Word-compatible file that replicates the source. Results are unlikely to be absolutely perfect – particularly if the text in your PDF has been scanned or flattened to an image. Look for a converter with OCR (optical character recognition) if you do have flattened documents. We tested using a sample magazine page from our chums at Computer Arts, and opened the results in Microsoft Word 2010. Note that LibreOffice's much looser interpretation of the DOCX standard will likely lead to quite poor results. 1. Foxyutils A wily utility that copes well with unusual fonts Foxyutils' PDF to Word converter takes the top spot in our test for several reasons. First, it was by far the cleverest when it came to picking a font similar to that of our test document, outputting a Word file very close to the original PDF. Second, it did well with the images in our document, recognising that there was more than one and breaking them up appropriately. And third, when you use Foxyutils' tools, you contribute to the company's tree-planting efforts. Isn't that nice? There are slight restrictions – a lack of OCR chief among them - and obviously you'll need internet connectivity to get the job done. But the lack of a dedicated software package to install, Foxyutils' use of SSL, and its promise to delete files as soon as they're downloaded means you could use this in a business situation if required. 2. Nitro PDF to Word Converter Quick, solid PDF conversion with a couple of niggles You'd be forgiven for missing the free online version of Nitro PDF to Word Converter when visiting its site, given that it's so smothered in adverts for its paid-for desktop app, but this is a perfectly competent free tool – no OCR though, sadly – suitable for occasional use. Upload your PDF, give it an email address to send the results to, and it'll transform that PDF into Word, Excel or Powerpoint files and vice versa; we wouldn't recommend using the Excel converter for mission-critical work, however. We were impressed with its attempt at converting our test document. There was a bit of text cleanup required, possibly as a result of the unusual font, but it separated the page's images into individually editable boxes, got the layout perfectly correct, and even managed to replicate the drop-cap, a feature that's often missed. Overall, not a bad job at all – we'd have preferred a direct download rather than it being delivered via email, but that's a small gripe. 3. UniPDF Great for batch processing but not compatible with all files UniPDF is a completely free Windows desktop PDF to Word converter (unless you're using it commercially) but one which fell over for an unspecified reason when converting our test PDF to Word format. But let's not be hasty here: UniPDF happily extracted the raw text, had no problem converting the PDF to a pixel-perfect PNG file, and did an good job of converting that very same PDF to HTML format, which we'll count as at least a partial pass. Although UniPDF doesn't support OCR (so flattened PDFs won't convert to editable text) we were impressed with its ability to translate our document's mildly unusual fonts into similar examples. It's also an easy app to use if you're doing batch processing – just drag in a folder full of PDFs, hit 'convert' and it'll go through each automatically. Considering the long-winded limitations of many online tools, this is a reason to try UniPDF. But if you absolutely must have a Word document? Maybe not. 4. Free File Converter Quick, easy and dirty converter that does more than just Word Free File Converter couldn't be simpler: upload your PDF, select an output format (everything from doc to ebook formats like EPUB and MOBI) and click the button to get a download link to your converted file. As you might expect, it offers a number of different format conversions besides just PDFs, although there's no OCR to be seen. PDF to Word conversion was okay, but not exceptional. Some of the text formatting Free File Converter gave us was a bit off, with certain headlines running over from one line to two, and it rendered all of the images on the page as a single background graphic, limiting flexibility. But there's one huge upside: Free File Converter can handle PDFs up to 300MB in size, so if you've got a huge, simple PDF to process it could be just the trick. 5. OnlineOCR An OCR specialist – as long as you feed it the right file Our sole OCR-only tool in this test, but there's a reason: OCR works well in certain circumstances, and very poorly in others. Our magazine page, when flattened and run through OnlineOCR's converter, did not fare well. Whether this is a limitation of the unusual fonts or the background images we're not sure, but the mess it made of the boxes at the bottom of the page suggest it's just not great at this sort of complex PDF to Word conversion. That's not to say it's a poor tool. Far from it; this outperforms a number of competing sites in its class, so much so that we've actually used OnlineOCR here at TechRadar to pull text from magazines so old that their archive discs have crumbled – although this required a lot of preprocessing to improve the clarity and contrast of text. Scanned PDFs of black text on white background tend to work perfectly without any fiddling, so if you've got a suitable source you'll get on well with this tool.

Round up: The best free VPN service 2016 Posted: The very best free VPN service The best free VPN With the eyes of ISPs growing ever more suspicious and government monitoring fast becoming something tangible and terrifying, the 'private' part of Virtual Private Network has never been more important. But hiding your internet traffic inside an encrypted tunnel isn't the only reason you might want to run a free VPN tool on your machine. Perhaps you want your network traffic to appear to emanate from elsewhere in the world in order to use region-locked services (presuming, of course, you can do so legally). Maybe you're looking to seamlessly access your home network while on the road, or don't trust the security of public Wi-Fi access points. The VPN tag covers a lot of potential uses. Looking for paid VPN? Check out our round-up of the best VPN services Bear in mind that using a free VPN does come with certain disadvantages, primarily that you'll experience slower internet speed as your traffic is encrypted and routed through the servers of your chosen provider. Free options usually end up throttled compared to their paid-for siblings and might also serve up ads or, in some cases, track your browsing habits to sell on to third parties. 1. CyberGhost 5 The best VPN tool to keep your browsing activity private CyberGhost is a free VPN that truly has its users' ideals in mind: the company proudly declares that it doesn't track your activity, and publishes a transparency report to back up its claims. You can even use its interface to restrict the amount of information you're passing on to the sites you visit, shutting down tracking cookies, malicious websites, and more. If you want your traffic private and protected, this is our number one choice. It's also supremely easy to use, with a simple interface which allows you to select the location of your new IP address, and good visual indication of what's going on. That said, CyberGhost does run a reasonably limited number of servers, with selections mainly focused in Europe – at the time of writing, the free version offers no location option for Canada or any servers located in Asia. You're also restricted to three hours per session, with a moderate delay and a few ads before you're able to connect – a small price to pay for privacy. 2. Tunnelbear Tunneling made simple - but watch out for the data limit Tunnelbear is, as its dev crows, 'really really simple' to use. It's probably the most friendly free VPN you'll find, with straightforward apps available for for Windows, MacOS and mobile devices. It's also one of the most well-travelled, with a truly worldwide network of tunnels to connect to, routing your data everywhere from Hong Kong to Norway – only its Australia and India nodes are restricted in the free edition. Much like CyberGhost, Tunnelbear promises high-end encryption and a complete absence of traffic logging. There's a pretty big kicker: the free version only offers 500MB of data transfer per month, so it's going to be reasonably useless if you're using it as a location-spoofing tool to watch geo-restricted video. For those moments when you're doing light browsing in a coffee shop, though, Tunnelbear's simplicity – and mobile compatibility – may come in very handy as long as you can cope with its slightly twee collection of bear puns. 3. VPNBook VNPBook is a simple, convenient way to protect your privacy If you're a confident computer user or want to protect more than just a Windows device, VPNBook is a great option. It doesn't even require any specific software – you just plug the appropriate info into your machine's system settings and you're connected. It uses your choice of point-to-point-tunneling (PPTP) or OpenVPN to encrypt your traffic and fire it out of one of six servers, three in Europe and three in North America. Being rough-and-ready, though, VPNBook does have its issues. We can't vouch for the specific encryption used, for a start, and its open nature (and potential for abuse) means it uses a password which changes frequently. If your ISP blocks PPTP connections, you'll need to use OpenVPN's client software – which pretty much nullifies the benefit of its compatibility with phones and games consoles. But for an ad-free, no-nonsense free VPN connection it's a great choice. 4. OpenVPN Server Setting up your own VPN server is an enterprise-level option While the OpenVPN team produces a more user-friendly free VPN option in the form of PrivateTunnel – which offers only limited data transfer in its free form – and many of the other options here use OpenVPN tech to get the job done, it's worth putting in the (considerable) effort to install an OpenVPN server on a home machine. You'll need to stump up some cash if you want to make use of more than the two client connections included with the server installation, but this is a proper VPN. Set up its server properly, connect to it with the OpenVPN client software, and you'll not only encrypt your network traffic but gain access to your home network as if you were connected locally -- all your shares, files and machines at your fingertips. Make no mistake, though: building your own OpenVPN server is enterprise-level stuff, certainly not for the faint-hearted given the amount of configuration required, and its absolute overkill for most purposes. But if you're in this for the 'network' side of VPN, look no further. 5. Hotspot Shield Free A promising VPN tool, but the ads and toolbars are overbearing It's been around for a while and has something of a mixed reputation: Hotspot Shield is a cracking free VPN, but suffers some pretty heavy drawbacks that are required to contribute to its upkeep. However, Hotspot Shield dev Anchorfree has recently made steps to improve its service to free users. While you'll have to put up with a decent number of ads and frequent pleading to upgrade to its Elite version, some of the more insidious aspects – browser toolbars, page-injected advertising – are on the outs. While it's quick, easy to install and available in a neat Chrome extension version, we still struggle to recommend Hotspot Shield Free fully. There's a 750MB data cap per day, a single USA output locale, and access to many video streaming sites is hidden behind the paid Elite subscription. You might also be interested in How to set up and maintain a VPN How to make your VPN more secure How to build a dedicated VPN router

You are subscribed to email updates from TechRadar: All latest Applications news feeds. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States