Alex Wawro

Want to keep your email safe from prying eyes? Encipher.it is a free snippet of code that you can store in your browser bookmarks to encrypt email, or any block of text you enter on a website.

To set it up, direct your Web browser to encipher.it, scroll to the Add Bookmark section, and add the Encipher It link to your bookmarks bar. In Firefox or Google Chrome, you can just click the Encipher It link and drag it to the Bookmarks bar; in Internet Explorer, you must right-click the link and select Add to Favorites.

Having trouble focusing on your work? You're not alone: The advent of smartphones, tablets, and Twitter has made staying connected to the flow of information seem seductively simple. All you have to do is leave your email inbox open in one tab, have Facebook or Twitter open in another, and set your phone to beep whenever you have an appointment to ensure that you stay productive without missing a single meeting or status update.

Yet chances are good that you aren’t as productive as you could be. For every timely email message you catch, or every insightful Twitter discussion you contribute to, you probably slog through 50 unimportant email missives or waste 20 minutes declining silly game requests on Facebook. Technology can be terribly distracting. With a few simple tips and tricks, however, you can trim the fat from your technological lifestyle and be more productive.

In July the Internet Systems Consortium will permanently shut down DNS servers deployed to serve as temporary surrogates for rogue DNS servers shut down as part of Operation Ghost Click, an FBI operation that brought down an Estonian hacker ring last year. If your PC is one of the more than 1 million computers infected that carry DNSChanger you might unknowingly be relying on one of the FBI's temporary servers to access the Internet, and if you don't eliminate DNSChanger from your PC before the FBI pulls the plug on its servers, you'll be left without Internet access. Read on to learn how to discover whether you're infected with DNSChanger, and what you can do to eliminate it from your system.

How to Tell Whether DNSChanger Has Infected Your PC

The DNSChanger Check-Up websites will automatically check which DNS servers you're using; it will let you know that your PC is clean by flashing a green background.To figure out whether you've been infected with DNSChanger, just point your Web browser to one of the (admittedly amateur-looking) DNSChanger Check-Up websites that Internet security organizations maintain across the globe. The link above will take you to a DNS Changer Check-Up page in the United States that the DNS Changer Working Group maintains; if you live outside the United States, you can consult the FBI's list of DNSChanger Check-Up websites to find an appropriate service for your region.

I can’t stand zombies. Zombie movies are boring, and games with zombie antagonists are a dime a dozen. Between Plants vs. Zombies and Left 4 Dead, I think we’ve hit our zombie quota for the foreseeable future. I’m ready for something new.

Your PC's hard drive is packed with your personal data. So when you want to get rid of your system or drive, you should permanently erase your storage device drives before you get rid of them. If your drives are encrypted and you trust the encryption protocol (full disk encryption is pretty safe), all you have to do is delete your encryption keys. If you want to safeguard your privacy further--and prevent data theft down the road--here are a few cheap and simple tools designed to wipe your hard drive, solid-state drive, or USB flash drive thoroughly before you dispose of it.

Because different types of drives use different storage methods, you need different tools to deal with each type. Solid-state drives, for instance, behave very differently from ordinary USB flash drives, hybrid hard drives (which combine a flash cache with a magnetic hard disk), or hard disk drives. This reflects the unique way that SSD firmware writes data to the drive: Wear-leveling algorithms, designed to lengthen the SSD's lifespan, cause data to be written across many different areas inside the drive.

Creating a bootable version of Windows, Mac OS, or Linux is a great way to repurpose your old USB flash drives. You never know when you might need to reinstall your favorite operating system or repair the PC of a family member or friend, so take a moment to read over our guide to creating bootable flash drives--and then build a portable PC toolkit you can carry in your pocket.

Diehard Windows users will be happy to know that Microsoft makes it easy to download a copy of the Windows 8 consumer preview and stick it on a flash drive for installation on any PC, anywhere. Check out Rick Broida's guide to installing Windows 8 on a flash drive if you're interested in throwing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto a USB stick that you can give to family and friends eager to play around with the future of Windows. If you want to keep a copy of the current version of Windows handy in case of emergencies, you can download a copy of Windows 7 to your flash drive and use it to install Windows 7 without the disk. The trick to installing any version of Windows from a flash drive is to download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which will allow you to mount the .iso image of Windows 7 or 8 on your flash drive and boot from it as though you were booting from your Windows installation disc.

It's been a rough week for Instagram purists.

Last Tuesday the popular photo-sharing app debuted on Android, opening the once iPhone-only Instagram service to the Android masses. And then on Monday, Facebook announced that it was acquiring Instagram for $1 billion--raising worries among some about what the new overlord's intentions might be.

With more than fifteen million accounts, chances are good that you or someone you know uses Instagram to edit and share photographs online. It’s a fantastic service, but it can be tricky to get your photos off the Instagram servers and onto your hard drive. So whether you accidentally delete your smartphone’s Instagram albums or just want to download copies of your old photos before closing your Instagram account, we dug up a few different methods to download your Instagram images.

Email or delete individual Instagram photos by tapping the option menu in the lower-right corner.At the time of writing Instagram offers no option to download all of your photographs in a single neat package. You can download individual images by opening the image in your Web browser and saving it to your hard drive or emailing the photo to yourself from the Instagram smartphone app, but that’s a tremendously inefficient way to download your Instagram album if you have more than a handful of images online.

The second phase of the Sins of A Solar Empire: Rebellion beta went live this week, so I spent some time playing with the new units and factions to figure out how Rebellion changes the slow, strategic pace that the space-based RTS Sins of A Solar Empire is famous for. While the average match remains the same (you'll still spend hours conquering planets and blasting pirates), the division of each side into Loyalist/Rebel factions and the addition of four new victory conditions make playing Sins of A Solar Empire: Rebellion feel like a new adventure.

If you’re unfamiliar with Sins of A Solar Empire, thanks for clicking on this headline! You’re clearly an adventurous soul, which suggests you may enjoy exploring the many spaceships, tech trees and diplomacy options Sins places at your disposal for the sole purpose of conquering a galaxy. Ostensibly, it’s a real-time strategy game set in space. But that’s too simple to encapsulate what it’s like to play Sins of A Solar Empire.

You can opt out of being tracked online by using a Web browser with support for Do Not Track, a privacy feature that lets you tell supporting websites that you don't want to be tracked by third parties (advertisers, marketing firms, and the like). It's like putting yourself on an online version of the Do Not Call list.

Now Mozilla is developing an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets that supports Do Not Track from the ground up. Code-named Boot to Gecko (B2G), this Linux-based mobile OS is designed to bring the (comparatively) rigorous privacy standards of the World Wide Web to smartphones and tablets.

Now that Google has unified its search functions, Gmail, and its other offerings under a single Google Privacy Policy, it’s much easier for you to carry your preference settings and personal information from one Google service to another. It’s also much easier for Google to build a comprehensive profile of you based on your search history, your correspondence through Google services, and the media you upload. If you're not comfortable sharing private information with anyone who has access to the Google servers, the company makes it pretty easy to dial back the amount of personal data you’re sharing (or even go cold turkey) if you know where to look.

Of course, if you just want to make your Google account more secure, you can employ plenty of tweaks to make it difficult for anyone to hack your account and sneak a peek at your personal data. If you also want to ensure that you’re sharing as little identifying information as possible while browsing the Web, simple changes such as opting out of personalized ads or clearing your Web search history can help to keep your private data off the grid.

PCWorld Editors Alex Wawro, Nate Ralph and Jason Cross (who sounds like he's trapped in a well) join Game On contributing writer David Daw to talk about what the popularity (and profit margin) of free-to-play games like Team Fortress 2, Tiny Tower and Realm Of The Mad God means for the future of the game industry. What makes a free-to-play game fun to play, and when is it worth paying for? Tune in to find out, and stick around 'till the end to hear our recommendations on some great free games for tablets, smartphones and PC that you might want to check out.

You could also check out the Free Friday feature on our Game On blog, but then you'd miss out on fantastic free-to-play games like Hero Academy and League of Legends. Choose wisely!