Normally it’s best to allow everyone their privacy when using a PC. But there may be occasional exceptions. You might legitimately be concerned about the content your kids are accessing online, for instance, or want to confirm that a work PC really is being used for work purposes;d History Viewer may be able to help.

Launch the program and it’ll provide easy access to your various histories for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. You’re able to view cookies, URL histories, download details, maybe even form history in some cases, more than enough to give you a very good idea how the browser is being used (unless the key details have been deleted, anyway).

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At face value, Nokia's results for Windows Phone are solid. One million Lumia devices sold in just its first quarter of availability. The sales add a bright spot to an otherwise gloomy Nokia calendar fourth-quarter earnings report, where smartphone sales slid 31 percent amid a 21 percent year-over-year drop in revenues.

The real story here though is the cost to Microsoft to ensure that success. Microsoft agreed to pay Nokia $1 billion to abandon Symbian as primary operating system for Windows Phone, according to reports soon after the deal was announced in February 2011. The Redmond, Wash.-based company paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter for "platform support payments", meaning each device cost Microsoft about $250 before any royalty payments received. That's a run rate of a billion dollars per year. So just how much is Nokia giving back to Microsoft?

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After a couple of private trial runs, nivio (the name is intentionally all-lowercase) has opened in limited beta to United States users. The service lets users have remote access to their own cloud-based Windows desktop, complete with app store-style access to premium applications for a monthly fee.

Nivio is made up of three parts: nDrive, nDesktop, and nApps. As the names may already suggest, they are a cloud storage platform, a cloud-based Windows desktop, and a platform for renting applications for your Windows desktop.

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It's not often when a developer tells you outright not to use its software, but that is exactly what Symantec is forced to do in light of the theft of source code. Last month, Hacktavist group Anonymous bragged that it had possession of code that powers several applications, including Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks and pcAnywhere.

Symantec says the code theft originally occurred in 2006. While at first security experts believed the theft to only be a black eye for the company's reputation, it now appears that the incident is far more serious. Symantec recommends users of pcAnywhere stop using the software immediately until there is a solution to address any security concerns.

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Last October, Motorola Mobility unveiled the 4G Droid Razr, the Android-powered smartphone that combined Motorola's strongest phone brand names in a single device. When the device went up for sale in November, it faced some negative reviews because of its weak battery life.

To remedy this, Motorola today released the Droid Razr Maxx, which is essentially the Droid Razr with a much bigger battery.

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Do I have your attention yet? Apple fans needn't worry, iPad has considerable lead over Android tablets. iPad global market share, as measured by mobile operating system, fell to 57.6 percent in fourth quarter from 68.2 percent a year earlier, according to Strategy Analytics. Meanwhile, Android tablets rose to 39.1 percent from 29 percent. Something else: Windows climbed from zero to 1.5 percent, and that's without tablet-optimized Windows 8.

Despite popular convention that people only want iPad, clearly somebody is buying Android. Strategy Analytics doesn't break down the numbers by vendor, but there's reason to ask about one. Amazon. For months there has been oft-asked question: Would $199 Kindle Fire cut into iPad sales? Last month, Amazon said that it sold over 4 million Kindles in December, but wouldn't specify how many were tablets. "Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter", Peter King, Strategy Analytics director, says. Perhaps that's answer enough.

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If you’re looking for advanced, low-level information on Microsoft technologies then it’ll probably be somewhere on Microsoft.com. But where, exactly? MSDN? Technet? One of the hundreds of team blogs? Somewhere else entirely?

Microsoft’s Desktop Player (a beta, but it seemed stable to us) aims to remove this uncertainty by providing a simple desktop client where you can enter your search query, discover related podcasts and webcasts, and even play the ones you need with a click.

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Popular system cleanup and optimization tool CCleaner has been updated with a range of improvements and a smattering of new features. CCleaner 3.15 sees support for the cleaning of a range of new applications including Freemake Video Downloader, Camtasia Studio and Ashampoo Burning Studio. As you would expect from any app update there are also a number of bug fixes as well as a small range of additional options.

In terms of new features, you will find that there is newly added support for Chrome Canary, including the ability to clear search data from the omnibox. The ability to remove items from the Recycle Bin is nothing new, but there is a new option to filter Recycle Bin deletion to only those files that were added more than 24 hours ago. This is a useful way to claw back a few extra megabytes of space while retaining the option of restoring some of the files you have deleted.

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All is forgiven when there's money to be made. That's the message investors delivered Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today. Shares rallied after yesterday's earnings report, which partly validated summer's controversial streaming and DVD rental strategies that sent the stock plunging several times and led to calls for Hastings' removal or resignation. That was oh-so six months ago, which is a lifetime in the memory of an investor.

Shares rose more than 23 percent in early trading -- to $117.12. Netflix closed at $95 yesterday and opened at $114. The price reached $118.78 soon after the opening bell. As I write, shares are bobbing -- now only up 22 percent. Shareholder forgiveness doesn't vanquish Hastings' sins, however. Netflix peaked at $304 on July 13, the day after notifying subscribers of price increases. There remains tremendous share value yet to recover, which is unlikely to come from today's rally.

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Putting information on the web is supposed to make it more convenient to access, but of course it doesn’t always work out that way. Especially if you’re accessing a site that is incredibly slow, for instance. Or you’re trying to download content that is spread all around the site, like multiple zip files, one each across many pages.

You may not have to put up with these inconveniences, though -- not if you’ve a copy of HTTrack to hand, as the program will automatically download the site you specify for easy reference later.

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This morning, before the opening bell, AT&T announced calendar fourth-quarter earnings and record iPhone sales -- 7.6 million. Combined with Verizon's number that works out to 32 percent of iPhones sold during the quarter. Sprint will announce earnings results on February 2, conceivably pushing the number close to 40 percent. Apple CEO Tim Cook has called China Apple's second-most important market. Want to guess which is first?

For AT&T, iPhone was huge during fourth quarter. The carrier sold 9.4 million smartphones, and 80.5 percent of them were iPhones. The number was smaller, but still substantial, for Verizon: 54.4 percent. While Android sales paled by comparison, AT&T doubled them year over year -- not surprising with Samsung's aggressive marketing campaign for Galaxy S II and mid-quarter's introduction of LTE models HTC Vivid and Galaxy S II Skyrocket.

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For a company which business depends on collecting data, Google sure was slow tabulating its report on smartphone usage. The study is available today, but the data is already outdated given strong holiday e-book reader and tablet sales and global impact of 37 million iPhones sold during fourth quarter -- the startling number Apple released yesterday. Still there are some fascinating trends here that likely will prove true had Google collected data in December or January rather than September-October.

What I find perplexing: 17 percent of US smartphone owners also have tablets -- 11 percent in Japan, 10 percent in United Kingdom and 8 percent each in France and Germany. Note: This data, as the rest, is for smartphones privately used. The percentages likely would be higher when including business use, and the trend is accelerating, says Google. My question, and this is really for you to answer: Why buy a tablet if you have a smartphone? Remember, Google isn't tracking PC owners who buy a tablet, but smartphones users who do.

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Hewlett-Packard announced on Wednesday that it has begun the great open-sourcing of mobile operating system webOS with the release of the Enyo 2.0 core application framework.

Just a little over one month ago, HP announced it would be turning over webOS software development to the community, and open sourcing its components while participating in the project as an investor and controlling interest.

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It's likely that most will expect domains belonging to popular web-based e-mail services are at the top of the list for the mountains of spam we receive everyday. That's not the case: the most common spam domains according to Chelmsford, Mass.-based security firm AVG are social networks.

Facebook tops the list at 7.3 percent, followed by Twitter at 4.2 percent. Considering these are the top two social networking sites, that's not too surprising. How about Google+? Hard to say since it doesn't have its own domain, nor did google.com appear in the list AVG supplied us. LinkedIn also appears, but way down in eighth at 1.5 percent of all spam.

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The compromised website is still the most effective attack vector for hackers to install malware on your computer with 47.6 percent of all malware installs occurring in that manner, says security firm AVG. Another 10.6 percent are tricked into downloading exploit code -- many times, without their knowledge -- by clicking on links on pages to sites hosting malware.

The Chelmsford, Mass. company announced its findings as part of a broader study of threats detected by its software. It also found that faked pharmacy sites are a popular attack method, seen in about 10.4 percent of all attacks.

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