Fourandsix's Photoshop plug-in will judge whether an image has been edited.

Fourandsix Technologies, a startup founded by a former Photoshop bigwig and a image-analysis guru, has released its first product, the FourMatch software to detect changes to an image.

The most obvious use for the $890 Photoshop plug-in: ensuring that digital photos used as legal evidence are authentic.

The company lists other possibilities, too, though, such as checking that nobody's fiddled with digital images of insurance claims or contest entries, or ensuring the legitimacy of photos that might be published as the truth.

Company executives have good street cred in the area: the software came from Chief Technology Officer Hany Farid, a longtime expert in photo forensics (Get it? Forensics sounds like Fourandsix), and its president is Kevin Connor, former vice president of product management for Photoshop at Adobe Systems. Farid and Adobe worked together in the area in 2007, but never released any software.

The software includes a year of ... [Read more]

If you have a Windows 7 PC but aren't sure you're ready to upgrade to Windows 8 yet, a dual-boot system might be a good way to ease into it. This will let you use both operating systems, side-by-side, until you're comfortable enough with Windows 8 to go all in. To configure your PC for dual-boot, all you have to do is create a new partition for Windows 8, then install it.

Caution: Before you begin, make sure to back up your system. This is a simple procedure, but there's always a risk of data loss whenever you modify disk partitions. If you have Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image handy, cloning your drive/partition is probably the best way to recover from any problems you might run into.

Create new partition in Windows 7 Step 1: In Windows 7, hit the shortcut Win+R, then type "diskmgmt.msc" to start Disk Management.

Step 2: To make room for Windows 8, you first need to shrink the C: volume. In Disk Management, right-click on your hard drive and select Shrink Volume, then choose how much space to shrink.

Step 3: Once the shrink task has completed, right-click on the unallocated partition, then select New Simple Volume. Go through the New Simple Volume Wizard and make sure to format the new par... [Read more]