techno-krazy

What is IP address..???

2009-11-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

n IP is a unique number assigned to each computer on a network. It is this unique address which represents the system on the network. Generally the IP of a particular system changes each time you log on to the network by dialing to your ISP and it is assigned to you by your ISP. IP of a system which is always on the network remains generally the same. Generally those kind of systems are most likely to suffer a hacking attack because of its stable IP. Using IP you can even execute system commands on the victim’s computer.
Lets take the example of the following IP address: 202.144.49.110 Now the first part, the numbers before the first decimal i.e. 209 is the Network number or the Network Prefix.. This means that it identifies the number of the network in which the host is. The second part i.e. 144 is the Host Number that is it identifies the number of the host within the Network. This means that in the same Network, the network number is same. In order to provide flexibility in the size of the Network, here are different classes of IP addresses:

Address Class Dotted Decimal Notation Ranges
Class A ( /8 Prefixes) 1.xxx.xxx.xxx through 126.xxx.xxx.xxx
Class B ( /16 Prefixes) 128.0.xxx.xxx through 191.255.xxx.xxx
Class C ( /24 Prefixes) 192.0.0.xxx through 223.255.255.xxx

The various classes will be clearer after reading the next few lines.

Each Class A Network Address contains a 8 bit Network Prefix followed by a 24-bit host number. They are considered to be primitive. They are referred to as "/8''s" or just "8's" as they have an 8-bit Network prefix.
In a Class B Network Address there is a 16 bit Network Prefix followed by a 16-bit Host number. It is referred to as "16's".

A class C Network address contains a 24-bit Network Prefix and a 8 bit Host number. It is referred to as
"24's" and is commonly used by most ISP's.

Due to the growing size of the Internet the Network Administrators faced many problems. The Internet routing tables were beginning to grow and now the administrators had to request another network number from the Internet before a new network could be installed at their site. This is where sub-netting came in.

Now if your ISP is a big one and if it provides you with dynamic IP addresses then you will most probably see that whenever you log on to the net, your IP address will have the same first 24 bits and only the last 8 bits will keep changing. This is due to the fact that when sub-netting comes in then the IP Addresses structure becomes:

xxx.xxx.zzz.yyy

where the first 2 parts are Network Prefix numbers and the zzz is the Subnet number and the yyy is the host number. So you are always connected to the same Subnet within the same Network. As a result the first 3 parts will remain the same and only the last part i.e. yyy is variable.
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For Example, if say an ISP xyz is given the IP: 203.98.12.xx Network address then you can be awarded any IP, whose first three fields are 203.98.12. Get it?

So, basically this means that each ISP has a particular range in which to allocate all its subscribers. Or in other words, all subscribers or all people connected to the internet using the same ISP, will have to be in this range. This in effect would mean that all people using the same ISP are likely to have the same first three fields of their IP Addresses.

This means that if you have done a lot of (By this I really mean a lot) of research, then you could figure out which ISP a person is using by simply looking at his IP. The ISP name could then be used to figure out the city and the country of the person. Right? Let me take an example to stress as to how cumbersome but easy (once the research is done) the above method can be.

In my country, say there are three main ISP’s:

ISP Name Network Address Allotted

ISP I 203.94.47.xx
ISP II 202.92.12.xx
ISP III 203.91.35.xx

Now, if I get to know the IP of an e-pal of mine, and it reads: 203.91.35.12, then I can pretty easily figure out that he uses ISP III to connect to the internet. Right? You might say that any idiot would be able to do this. Well, yes and no. You see, the above method of finding out the ISP of a person was successful only because we already had the ISP and Network Address Allotted list with us. So, what my point is, that the above method can be successful only after a lot of research and experimentation. And, I do think such research can be helpful sometimes.

New Desktop Search Tool...very fast!

2008-08-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

Locate32 is a little known but highly impressive desktop search program. It works like updatedb and locate commands in Unix based systems. In other words, it uses databases to store information about directory structures and uses these databases in searches. The use of these databases provides very fast searching speed. It does not have all the features of the "big boys" (like searching within pdf files), but for something quick and unobtrusive, it's a good option.

The software includes a dialog based application as well as console programs which can be used to both update and access databases. Supported operation systems are Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista.

Locate32 does NOT have to be running at all times like both Copernic and Google desktop. In my tests, it wasn't quite as fast as either of the above, but it is still quite fast. Plus, I really like not having to have it run all the time. Just remember to update the databases fairly regularly. Please note that finding words within files is somewhat difficult to find. At first, I didn't believe that it included this feature, but it is included. You just have to look to find the feature. Available in many languages.

http://www.locate32.net

Untold Windows Tips and Secrets

2008-08-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another Hacking Truths Manual. This time I have a collection of Tips and Tricks which no body normally knows, the secrets which Microsoft is afraid to tell the people, the information which you will seldom find all gathered up and arranged in a single file. To fully reap this Manual you need to have a basic understanding of the Windows Registry, as almost all the Tricks and Tips involve this file.

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Important Note: Before you read on, you need to keep one thing in mind. Whenever you make changes to the Windows Registry you need to Refresh it before the changes take place. Simply press F5 to refresh the registry and enable the changes. If this does not work Restart your system

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Exiting Windows the Cool and Quick Way

Normally it takes a hell lot of time just Shutting down Windows, you have to move your mouse to the Start Button, click on it, move it again over Shut Down, click, then move it over the necessary option and click, then move the cursor over the OK button and once again (you guessed it) click.This whole process can be shortened by creating shortcuts on the Desktop which will shut down Windows at the click of a button. Start by creating a new shortcut( right click and select New> Shortcut). Then in the command line box, type (without the quotes.)

'C:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindowsexec'

This Shortcut on clicking will restart Windows immediately without any Warning. To create a Shortcut to Restarting Windows, type the following in the Command Line box:

'c:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows'

This Shortcut on clicking will shut down Windows immediately without any Warning.

Ban Shutdowns : A trick to Play on Lamers

This is a neat trick you can play on that lamer that has a huge ego, in this section I teach you, how to disable the Shut Down option in the Shut Down Dialog Box. This trick involves editing the registry, so please make backups. Launch regedit.exe and go to :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

In the right pane look for the NoClose Key. If it is not already there then create it by right clicking in the right pane and selecting New > String Value.(Name it NoCloseKey ) Now once you see the NoCloseKey in the right pane, right click on it and select Modify. Then Type 1 in the Value Data Box.

Doing the above on a Win98 system disables the Shut Down option in the Shut Down Dialog Box. But on a Win95 machine if the value of NoCloseKey is set to 1 then click on the Start > Shut Down button displays the following error message:

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.

You can enable the shut down option by changing the value of NoCloseKey to 0 or simply deleting the particular entry i.e. deleting NoCloseKey.

Instead of performing the above difficult to remember process, simply save the following with an extension of .reg and add it's contents to the registry by double clicking on it.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

"NoClose"="1"

Disabling Display of Drives in My Computer

This is yet another trick you can play on your geek friend. To disable the display of local or networked drives when you click My Computer go to :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Now in the right pane create a new DWORD item and name it NoDrives. Now modify it's value and set it to 3FFFFFF (Hexadecimal) Now press F5 to refresh. When you click on My Computer, no drives will be shown. To enable display of drives in My Computer, simply delete this DWORD item. It's .reg file is as follows:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

"NoDrives"=dword:03ffffff

Take Over the Screen Saver

To activate and deactivate the screen saver whenever you want, goto the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ScreenSavers

Now add a new string value and name it Mouse Corners. Edit this new value to -Y-N. Press F5 to refresh the registry. Voila! Now you can activate your screensaver by simply placing the mouse cursor at the top right corner of the screen and if you take the mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen, the screensaver will deactivate.

Pop a banner each time Windows Boots

To pop a banner which can contain any message you want to display just before a user is going to log on, go to the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WinLogon

Now create a new string Value in the right pane named LegalNoticeCaption and enter the value that you want to see in the Menu Bar. Now create yet another new string value and name it: LegalNoticeText. Modify it and insert the message you want to display each time Windows boots. This can be effectively used to display the company's private policy each time the user logs on to his NT box. It's .reg file would be:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]

"LegalNoticeCaption"="Caption here."

Delete the Tips of the Day to save 5KB

Windows 95 had these tips of the day which appeared on a system running a newly installed Windows OS. These tips of the day are stored in the Windows Registry and consume 5K of space. For those of you who are really concerned about how much free space your hard disk has, I have the perfect trick.

To save 5K go to the following key in Regedit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Tips

Now simply delete these tricks by selecting and pressing the DEL key.

Change the Default Locations

To change the default drive or path where Windows will look for it's installation files, go to the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\SourcePath

Now you can edit as you wish.

Secure your Desktop Icons and Settings

You can save your desktop settings and secure it from your nerdy friend by playing with the registry. Simply launch the Registry Editor go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

In the right pane create a new DWORD Value named NoSaveSettings and modify it's value to 1. Refresh and restart for the settings to get saved.

CLSID Folders Explained

Don't you just hate those stubborn stupid icons that refuse to leave the desktop, like the Network Neighborhood icon. I am sure you want to know how you can delete them. You may say, that is really simple, simply right click on the concerned icon and select Delete. Well not exactly, you see when you right click on these special folders( see entire list below)neither the rename nor the delete option does not appear. To delete these folders, there are two methods, the first one is using the System Policy Editor(Poledit in the Windows installation CD)and the second is using the Registry.

Before we go on, you need to understand what CLSID values are. These folders, like the Control Panel, Inbox, The Microsoft Network, Dial Up Networking etc are system folders. Each system folder has a unique CLSID key or the Class ID which is a 16-byte value which identifies an individual object that points to a corresponding key in the registry.

To delete these system Folders from the desktop simply go to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\Namespace{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}

To delete an icon simply delete the 16 byte CLSID value within "NameSpace". The following are the CLSID values of the most commonly used icons:

My Briefcase:{85BBD920-42AO-1069-A2E4-08002B30309D}

Desktop: {00021400-0000-0000-C000-0000000000046}

Control Panel:{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

Dial-Up-Networking:{992CFFA0-F557-101A-88EC-00DD01CCC48}

Fonts: {BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948534}

Inbox :{00020D76-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}

My Computer :{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Network Neighborhood:{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-O8002B30309D}

Printers :{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-O8002B30309D}

Recycle Bin :{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}

The Microsoft Network:{00028B00-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}

History: {FF393560-C2A7-11CF-BFF4-444553540000}

Winzip :{E0D79300-84BE-11CE-9641-444553540000}

For example, to delete the Recycle Bin, first note down it's CLSID value, which is: 645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E. Now go to the Namespace key in the registry and delete the corresponding key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}

Similarly to delete the History folder, delete the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{FBF23B42-E3F0-101B-8488-00AA003E56F8}

Sometimes, you may need to play a trick on your brother or friend, well this one teaches you how to hide all icons from the Desktop. Go to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

In the right pane create a new DWORD value by the name: NoDesktop and set its value to: 1. Reboot and you will find no icons on the desktop.

Till now you simply learnt how to delete the special system folders by deleting a registry key, but the hack would have been better if there was a way of adding the DELETE and RENAME option to the right click context menus of these special folders. You can actually change the right click context menu of any system folder and add any of the following options: RENAME, DELETE, CUT, COPY, PASTE and lots more.

This hack too requires you to know the CLSID value of the system folder whose menu you want to customize. In this section, I have taken up Recycle Bin as the folder whose context menu I am going to edit.

Firstly launch the registry editor and open the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\ShellFolder.

In Case you want to edit some other folder like say the FONTS folder, then you will open the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{CLSID VALUE HERE}\ShellFolder.

In the right pane there will be a DWORD value names attributes. Now consider the following options:

To add the Rename option to the menu, change the value of Attributes to
50 01 00 20

To add the Delete option to the menu, change the value of Attributes to
60 01 00 20

3. To add both the Rename & Delete options to the menu, change the value of Attributes to 70,01,00,20

4. Add Copy to the menu, change Attributes to 41 01 00 20

5. Add Cut to the menu, change Attributes to 42 01 00 20

6. Add Copy & Cut to the menu, change Attributes to 43 01 00 20

7. Add Paste to the menu, change Attributes to 44 01 00 20

8. Add Copy & Paste to the menu, change Attributes to 45 01 00 20

9. Add Cut & Paste to the menu, change Attributes to 46 01 00 20

10.Add all Cut, Copy & Paste to the menu, change Attributes to 47 01 00 20

We want to add only the Rename option to the right click context menu of the Recycle Bin, so change the value of attributes to: 50 01 00 20. Press F5 to refresh and then after rebooting you will find that when you right click on the Recycle Bin a RENAME option pops up too.

To reset the default Windows options change the value of Attributes back to

40 01 00 20

The Registry File which one can create for the above process would be something like the below:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\Shell-Folder]

"Attributes"=hex:50,01,00,20

To access say the Modem Properties in the Control Panel Folder, the normal procedure is: Click on Start, Click on Settings> Control Panel and then wait for the Control Panel window to pop up and then ultimately click on the Modems icon.

Wouldn't it be lovely if you could shorten the process to: Click on Start> Control Panel>Modems. Yes you can add the Control Panel and also all other Special System Folders directly to the first level Start Menu. Firstly collect the CLSID value of the folder you want to add to the start menu. I want to add Control Panel hence the CLSID value is: 21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D

Now right click on the Start Button and select Open. Now create a new folder and name it: Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

NOTE: Do not forget the period after the 'l' in Panel. Similarly all system folders can be added to the Start Menu.(accept My Briefcase, I think)

Deleting System Options from the Start menu

You can actually remove the Find and Run options from the start menu by performing a simple registry hack. Again like always Launch the registry editor and scroll down to the below key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Right-click on the right pane and select New, DWORD Value. Name it NoFind.(To remove the RUN option name it NoRun). Double-click the newly create DWORD to edit it's value and enter 1 as its value. This will disable the FIND option of the Start Menu and will also disable the default Shortcut key(F3 for Find.)

To restore the Run or find command modify the value of the DWORD to 0 or simply Delete the DWORD value.

Fed Up of the boring Old Yellow Folder Icons?[Drive Icons Included]

NOTE: This trick hasn't been tried on Win98.

You can easily change the boring yellow folder icons to your own personalized icons. Simply create a text file and copy the following lines into it:

[.ShellClassInfo]

ICONFILE=Drive:\Path\Icon_name.extension

Save this text file by the name, desktop.ini in the folder, whose icon you want to change. Now to prevent this file from getting deleted change it's attributes to Hidden and Read Only by using the ATTRIB command.

To change the icon of a drive, create a text file containing the following lines:

[Autorun]

ICON=Drive:\Path\Icon_name.extension

Save this file in the root of the drive whose icon you want to change and name it autorun.inf For Example, if you want to change the icon of a floppy, SAVE THE icon in a:\icon_name.ico One can also create a kewl icon for the Hard Disk and create a text file [autorun.inf] and store it in "c:\".

Securing NT

By default, NT 4.0 displays the last person who logged onto the system. This can be considered to be a security threat, especially in the case of those who choose their password to be same as their Username. To disable this bug which actually is a feature, go to the following key in the registry editor:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Click and select the ReportBookOK item and create a new string value called DontDisplayLastUserName. Modify it and set it's value to 1.

As a system administrator, you can ensure that the passwords chosen by the users are not too lame or too easy to guess. NT has this lovely utility called the User Manager which allows the administrator to set the age limit of the password which forces the users to change the password after a certain number of days. You can also set the minimum length of passwords and prevent users to use passwords which already have been used earlier and also enable account lockouts which will deactivate an account after a specified number of failed login attempts.

When you log on to Win NT, you should disable Password Caching, this ensures Single NT Domain login and also prevents secondary Windows Logon screen.

Simply copy the following lines to a plain text ASCII editor like: Notepad and save it with an extension, .reg

----------------DISABLE.reg-----------------

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Network]

"DisablePwdCaching"=dword:00000001

----------------DISABLE.reg-----------------

To Enable Password Caching use the following .reg file:

--------------Enable.reg-----------------

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Network]

"DisablePwdCaching"=dword:00000000

--------------Enable.reg-----------------

Cleaning Recent Docs Menu and the RUN MRU

The Recent Docs menu can be easily disabled by editing the Registry. To do this go to the following Key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Now in the right pane, create a new DWORD value by the name: NoRecentDocsMenu and set it's value to 1. Restart Explorer to save the changes.

You can also clear the RUN MRU history. All the listings are stored in the key:

HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU

You can delete individual listings or the entire listing. To delete History of Find listings go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Doc Find Spec MRU

and delete.

Customizing the Right Click Context Menu of the Start Menu

When you right click on the start menu, only 3 options pop up: Open, Explore, and Find. You can add your own programs to this pop up menu( which comes up when we right click on it.) Open Regedit and go to the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Shell

Right click on the shell and create a new Sub Key (You can create a new SubKey by right clicking on the Shell Key and selecting New > Key.). Type in the name of the application you want to add to the start menu. I want to add Notepad to the Start Menu and hence I name this new sub key, Notepad. Now right click on the new registry key that you just created and create yet another new key named Command. Enter the
pane. So I Modify the value of the default string value and enter the full pathname of Notepad:

c:\wndows\notepad.exe.

Now press F5 to refresh. Now if you right click on the Start Button you will find a new addition to the Pop Up Menu called Notepad. Clicking on it will launch Notepad.

We can not only add but also remove the existing options in this pop up box.

To delete the Find option, go to the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Shell\Find

Delete Find. DO NOT delete Open else you will not be able to open any folders in the Start Menu like Programs, Accessories etc.

BMP Thumbnail As Icon

You can actually change the default BMP icon to a thumbnail version of the actual BMP file. To do this simply go to HKCU\Paint.Picture\Default. In the right pane change the value of default to %1. Please note however that this will slow down the display rate in explorer if there are too many BMP thumbnails to display. You can use other icons too, simply enter the pathname.To restore back to the normal change the vale of default back to: C:\Progra~1\Access~1\MSPAINT.EXE,1.

Customizing The Shortcut Arrow

All shortcuts have a tiny black arrow attached to it's icon to distinguish from normal files. This arrow can sometimes be pretty annoying and as a Hacker should know how to change each and everything, here goes another trick. Launch the Registry Editor and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Shell Icons.

Now, on the right pane is a list of icons ( we found out that on some systems, Windows 98 especially, the right pane is blank. Don't worry, just add the value as required ). Find the value 29. If it isn't there, just add it. The value of this string should be C:\Windows\system\shell32.dll, 29 ( which means the 30th icon in shell32.dll - the first one begins with 0 ). Now, we need blank icon to do this. Just create one with white as the whole icon. Go here to learn how to create an icon. Once done just change the value to C:\xxx.ico, 0 where "xxx" is the full path of the icon file and "0" is the icon in it.

Now for some fun. If the blank icon is a bit boring, change it again. You will find that under shell32.dll there is a gear icon, a shared folder ( the hand ) and much more. Experiment for yourself!

Use Perl to Get List or Services Running on your NT box

Use the following Perl Script to get a list of Services running on your NT system

--------------script.pl-----------------

#!c:\per\bin\perl.exe

use Win32::Service;

my ($key, %service, %status, $part);

Win32::Service::GetServices(' ',\%services);

foreach $key (sort keys %services) {

print "Print Name\t: $key, $services{$key}\n";

Win32::Service::GetStatus( ' ',$services{$key};

\%status);

foreach $part (keys %status) {

print "\t$part : $status{$part}\n" if($part eq "CurrentState");

}

}

-------------script.pl-------------------

Internet Explorer Tricks and Tips

Resizable Full Screen Toolbar

The Full Screen option increases the viewable area and makes surfing more enjoyable but sometimes we need the Toolbar but also need to have extra viewing area. Now this hack teaches you how to change the size of the Internet Explorer toolbar. This registry hack is a bit complicated as it involves Binary values, so to make it simple, I have included the following registry file which will enable the resizable option of the Internet Explorer toolbar which was present in the beta version of IE.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar]

"Theater"=hex:0c,00,00,00,4c,00,00,00,74,00,00,00,18,00,00,00,1b,00,00,00,5c,\

00,00,00,01,00,00,00,e0,00,00,00,a0,0f,00,00,05,00,00,00,22,00,00,00,26,00,\

00,00,02,00,00,00,21,00,00,00,a0,0f,00,00,04,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,a0,0f,00,\

00,03,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

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HACKING TRUTH: Internet Explorer 5 displays the friendly version of HTTP errors like NOT FOUND etc . They are aimed at making things easier for newbies. If you would rather prefer to see the proper error pages for the web server you're using, go to Tools, Internet Options and select the Advanced tab. Then scroll down and uncheck the Show friendly http errors box.

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Making the Internet Explorer & the Explorer Toolbars Fancy

The Internet Explorer toolbar looks pretty simple. Want to make it fancy and kewl? Why not add a background image to it. To do this kewl hack launch the Windows Registry Editor and go to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\Toolbar\.

Now in the right pane create a new String Value and name it BackBitmap and modify it's value to the path of the Bitmap you want to dress it up with by rightclicking on it and choosing Modify. When you reboot the Internet Explorer and the Windows Explorer toolbars will have a new look.

Change Internet Explorer's Caption

Don't like the caption of Internet Explorer caption? Want to change it? Open the registry editor and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main.

In the right pane create a new String Value names Window Title (Note the space between Window and Title). Right click on this newly created String Value and select Modify. Type in the new caption you want to be displayed. Restart for the settings to take place.

Now let's move on to some Outlook Express Tricks.

Colorful Background

Don't like the boring background colors of Outlook Express? To change it launch the Windows Registry Editor and scroll down to the

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Mail And News key.

On the left pane, click on ColorCycle or select Edit and Modify in the menu. Now change the value to 1. Close and restart. Now, launch Outlook Express and whenever you open up a New Message, hold down ctrl-shift and tap the z key to scroll to change the background color. Repeat the keystroke to cycle through the colors.

Internet Explorer 5 Hidden Features

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 has several hidden features which can be controlled using the Windows Registry. Open your registry and scroll down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Restrictions

Create a new DWORD value named x(See complete list of values of x below) and modify it's value to 1 to enable it and to 0 to disable it.

NoBrowserClose : Disable the option of closing Internet Explorer.

NoBrowserContextMenu : Disable right-click context menu.

NoBrowserOptions : Disable the Tools / Internet Options menu.

NoBrowserSaveAs : Disable the ability to Save As.

NoFavorites : Disable the Favorites.

NoFileNew : Disable the File / New command.

NoFileOpen : Disable the File / Open command.

NoFindFiles : Disable the Find Files command.

NoSelectDownloadDir : Disable the option of selecting a download directory.

NoTheaterMode : Disable the Full Screen view option.

Recover a Corrupted System File

2008-08-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

Recover a Corrupted System File

If an essential Windows file gets whacked by a virus or otherwise corrupted, restore it from the Windows CD. Search the CD for the filename, replacing the last character with an underscore; for example, Notepad.ex_. If it's found, open a command prompt and enter the command EXPAND, followed by the full pathname of the file and of the desired destination: EXPAND D:\SETUP\NOTEPAD.EX_ C:\Windows\NOTEPAD.EXE. If either pathname contains any spaces, surround it with double quotes.

If the file isn't found, search on the unmodified filename. It will probably be inside a CAB file, which Win XP treats as a folder. Simply right-drag and copy the file to the desired location. In other Windows platforms, search for a file matching *.cab that contains the filename. When the search is done, open a command prompt and enter EXTRACT /L followed by the desired location, the full pathname of the CAB file, and the desired filename; for example: EXTRACT /L C:\Windows D:\I386\Driver.cab Notepad.exe. Again, if the destination or CAB file pathname contains spaces, surround it with double quotes.

How to Reduce Spam

2008-08-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

As spam recipients go, I'm a class act. I get hundreds every day and on some days, more than 1,000. Yet in my mail box I hardly see any. Here's how I do it.

First, a little history. I used to use a Bayesian spam filter running on my PC. The product I used was an Outlook add-in called JunkOut. Like most Bayesian filters it took a while to train but once trained it worked just fine. The spam detection rate was around 98% and the number of false positives (good mail wrongly classified as spam) was vanishingly small.

But there was a problem. As my spam mail volume grew, the time taken by the spam filter to process my mail was growing to the point of being unacceptable. Some days it was taking 10 minutes or more to process my mail.

I needed a different solution. I tried rule-based spam filters that used less processing than Bayesian filters. I tried setting up my own mail server on a dedicated PC. I tried various commercial spam filtering services and other options as well. None of these gave me what I was looking for. But then I tried Google's GMail and bingo! I found what I had been looking for.

Unlike some other webmail services, Gmail provides spam filtering for free. That's no big deal; Yahoo!, Hotmail and others do that as well. What's different about Gmail is that it also provides free POP3 mail access.

Most of my spam mail is sent to the address editor@techsupportalert.com. That's no surprise; that address appears in every issue of this newsletter and on my website as well.

What I do is to forward all mail from that address to my Gmail account where it is spam filtered automatically.

The GMail spam filter detection rate is good, around 95%, so around 950 of the 1000 spam messages I receive daily never get to my Google Inbox.

I then use POP3 access to download the contents of my Google Inbox to Outlook. The incoming mail is then filtered using the excellent network-based Cloudmark spam filter that is installed on my PC.

Cloudmark's detection rate is around 92%. So of the 50 or so spam emails in my Google Inbox each day, fewer than five make it through to my Outlook Inbox.

Now here's the crunch. Both the Google GMail spam filter and the Cloudmark spam filter have the same characteristic; they virtually never classify my real mail as spam. That means I don't need to regularly check my spam folders to see if they contain genuine correspondence. That's a real plus with large spam folders.

The spam detection rates for GMail and Cloudmark are good, though a long way from the best in their class. But that doesn't matter. By chaining the two systems together I increase my aggregate spam detection rate to 99% plus and that rate IS right up there with the best.

So the end result is that of 1,000 spam emails per day I see fewer than five. At the same time my real mail is virtually never sent to a spam folder. Problem solved.

Forwarding my editor@techsupportalert.com to GMail is easy for me as I control the email to my website. Other users, however, may not have the facility to redirect mail from their normal mail account to a GMail account. Some mail services provide this feature, others don't; you'll have to check your service to find out.

Even if your account doesn't allow mail forwarding you can do it yourself using a free utility called ERC. This runs on your PC and can be scheduled to automatically log into your mail account and forward the mail to another account. In fact, it can forward mail from up to three different accounts.

A better solution in the long run, though, may be to shift your permanent email address to Gmail.

I use Cloudmark for my secondary spam filter but a good Bayesian filter would perform well in the role provided you have the patience to train it. SpamBayes and K9 are good examples and both are free. The Thunderbird mail client of course has its own built in Bayesian spam filter so there is no need for another.

Whatever product you chose, I do suggest you try this combination of remote and local spam filtering. It could be just what you have been looking for.

JunkOut: http://www.theofficemaven.com/junkout/download.html
ERC: http://www.chimera.co.nz/index.html
GMail: http://gmail.google.com/
Cloudmark Desktop: http://www.cloudmark.com/homeoffice/
SpamBayes: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
K9: http://keir.net/k9.html

Best Free Anti-Virus Software

2008-07-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Antivirus programs provide a good layer of protection from a multitude of viral, Trojan, and rootkit Internet threats. They also can stop virus infestation from cross-media file sharing. Antivirus programs can be used as a secondary preventative Internet security solution inside a firewall.

If you're looking for the best possible protection, our top recommendation is Avira AntiVir Personal Edition. Although its detection rate is outstanding, there are some reservations. First, it lacks the email scanning feature that is only available in the paid version. This means that AntiVir won't warn you of infected emails before you open them. However, should you open an infected email, AntiVir will still spring into action, so the absence of an email scanner doesn't mean that you're not protected from email-based infections. Our second reservation is that AntiVir is quite an intrusive product - you will certainly be well aware of its presence, especially with the advertisements that appear with every update. Finally, AntiVir Personal Edition Classic has a time-limited license. It is renewable, but be aware that you'll have to periodically go through the hoops. The latest version is very light on resources, and includes anti-rootkit and a faster scan rate.

If you're not prepared to accept the drawbacks of AntiVir, we would suggest either AVG Antivirus Free Edition or the Avast! scanner. Neither is quite as effective in detection as AntiVir, but both are more complete products, and less intrusive in use.

AVG Free has been continuously refined since it was initially released in 1991. The latest version makes further improvements to an already solid product. It now includes spyware, phishing, and email scam protection. Although it has grown considerably in size and is very heavy on resources, its detection rate is also excellent. Regular automatic updates come quickly as before and, despite rumors, the new email scanning feature is not trial limited to 30 days. Free and pro versions are available; the only difference is that the free version has anti-rootkit disabled, provides Linkscanner Lite instead of Linkscanner Pro and has no technical support other than a free user forum .

Fractionally less effective is the free Avast! scanner, although its funky media player style interface is not to everyone's taste. Avast now has built-in anti-rootkit and anti-spyware capabilities. It also has full real-time capabilities, including a web scanner, an e-mail scanner and IM and P2P protection. Avast also requires periodic re-registration, whereas AVG Free does not. However, Avast does not seem to suffer the signature-file update problems that plague some AVG users.

AVG and Avast are excellent free products that provide a real alternative to the major anti-viruses.

Some slight improvement is possible if you run regular on-demand scans with an additional separate anti-virus product, though this is not necessary.

On-demand scans can be run regularly (at least weekly), to check for viruses and other malware that may have been missed by your main scanner.

If you're not using AntiVir then your best option is to install Antivir Personal Edition without the guard. You can do this when you custom install it. If you are already using AntiVir, there's no real need for an on-demand anti-virus, as the overlap is too great.

A good option for on-demand scanning is the free version of the commercial AV product BitDefender. It's a good product with very good detection rates, but because the free version lacks an email scanner and a resident virus guard, it's only suitable for use as an on-demand scanner, not as your main AV program. There are some other limitations as well. It has an annoying habit of detecting malware products that have been quarantined by other security products, and you can't exclude these areas from subsequent scans. The program itself is using an old version of the engine, so the detection is slightly weaker. And it's only available with a one year non-renewable license.

AntiVir
Website:
http://www.free-av.com
Author: Avira
Date: 06/30/2008
Version: 8.0
Download File size: 21.28MB
License: Freeware
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000 - Vista 64bit
64 Bit Capable: yes
Portable version available: no
Other languages supported: yes
Additional Software Required: no

AVG Anti Virus
Website: http://free.grisoft.com/
Author: Grisoft
Date: 06/30/2008
Version: 8.0
Download File size:47.1MB
License: Freeware
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000 - Vista X64
64 Bit Capable: no
Portable version available: no
Other languages supported: no
Additional Software Required: no

Avast 4!
Website: http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Author: Alwil Software
Date: 06/30/2008
Version: 4.8.1201
Download File size: 23.11MB
License: Freeware
Operating systems supported: Windows 95 - Vista 64bit
64 Bit Capable: yes
Portable version available: no
Other languages supported: yes
Additional Software Required: no

BitDefender
Website: http://www.bitdefender.com/
Author: Softwin
Date: 06/30/2008
Version: 10.0
Download File size: 13.18MB
License: Freeware with registration
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000 - Vista 32bit
64 Bit Capable: yes
Portable version available: yes
Other languages supported: yes
Additional Software Required: None

A Guide to Securing Your PC

2008-07-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

In today's climate what is the best approach to avoiding getting your PC infected with malware? These are some simple steps you can take to ensure viruses, trojans, keyloggers and other nasties don't take control of your PC

After spending years testing security products I've learned an important lesson. Don't get infected by malware.

In other words, put maximum effort into preventing infection rather than detecting and removing infection.

This statement may seem bland and unremarkable but there's more to it than you think.

The traditional way of adding additional protection

Many people protect their PC's by using multiple signature scanners based on anti-viruses, anti-spywares, anti-trojans and anti-rootkits.

It is not as secure as many people think and for most folks, the cost is too high and the additional protection afforded too little.

The cost here is not so much financial though that is an issue, but rather the serious impact adding many security layers can have on the performance of your PC.

There is also a cost in complexity. The more security programs you run the more chance they will either interfere with each other or with other programs.

Each additional layers you add increases your protection but by an incremental amount only. A good anti-virus program may offer 80% protection. Adding a good anti-spyware utility may increase this to 85%. The addition of an anti-trojan may take it to 88%.

This is because today's security products overlap in function much more than they used to. A modern anti-virus program will detect a lot of spyware while a modern spyware program will detect some viruses, worms and trojans as well.

Although the protection achieved only goes up incrementally with each layer added, the processing load on your PC will rise more or less in proportion to the number of layers. So using adding an anti-spyware layer to your anti-virus layer will double the load on your PC. Adding in an anti-trojan as well may well triple it.
So folks, while layering is a good thing we are faced here with a law of diminishing returns.

But that's not the only problem with the traditional layering approach to protection. If an aggressive malware program is allowed to run on your PC it may disable all your layers of protection rendering them useless.

I've seen it happen many times and it is a frightening sight to see all your security programs icons disappear from the system tray

Thankfully some security programs resist termination by hostile agents but the majority don't. And even those that do resist may well prove vulnerable to new, more advanced termination methods yet to be developed by malware programmers.

My approach these days is simple: if you allow malware programs to run on your PC don't expect your security programs to fully protect you. If you are lucky they will but with security, you shouldn't rely on luck.
So how do you prevent infection?

Good Safe Computing Practices

Ensure you keep Windows and MS Office (if you use it) completely up-to-date by applying the latest fixes from the Microsoft Update Service. Make sure the automatic update settings are Automatic (or at least not turned off).
Make sure your other software products are also fully updated, particularly popular products like Firefox, Opera, Adobe Reader, Sun Java, Flash plug-ins and media players. The easiest way to do this is to use the free Secunia Software Inspector.
Switch to alternative products if you can. Sometimes they are even better than the popular ones and less malware writers would target it since it is less popular. For example, Firefox or Opera instead of Internet Explorer, Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader, The KM Player instead of Quicktime/Windows Media Player and Open Office instead of Microsoft Office.
Be careful where you surf. In particular stay away from sites offering commercial software serial numbers, keygens, other hacked material or adult-related content. Avoid accidentally wandering to hostile sites by installing McAfee Site Advisor, Linkscanner lite (does not work with Firefox 3 yet), WOT, Finjan SecureBrowsing or HauteSecure. They are free programs/plugins that append site security ratings to search engine listings and sites.You can also add the Netcraft toolbar for anti-phishing.
Never click on email attachments from untrusted sources however tempting and attractive such attachments may seem. Similarly, never click on links in email from unknown correspondents.
Never install programs unless you are fully confident they are clean. In particular, only download files from trusted sources and never install programs that friends give you on removable media unless you have verified that are clean by submitting them to free web based signature scanning services such as Jotti, Virus Total and optionally the behavioral analyzer Anubis.
Have an inbound firewall in place. At the very least, make sure Windows Firewall is turned on. This would be enough for most people. If you are running Vista, you can use the free Vista Firewall Control to enhance the security and usability. Firewalls with outbound protection can also be used. Currently the best firewalls are Comodo Firewall Pro, Online Armor, ZoneAlarm Pro and Sunbelt Personal Firewall.

These measures can protect your PC from infection a great deal. However, sticking to these rules is not easy; it requires a level of discipline most users don't have. Who hasn't been tempted to open a funny PowerPoint email attachment or install a free game?

And it's not only a question of discipline. These days you can easily get infected simply by innocently surfing to a trusted web site that has been hacked or opening a "loaded" MS Office document. You need more protection that the basic security rules can provide.

Protection is better than cure

The best way to increase your level of protection is to make sure that if a malware program sneaks its way on to your PC that it is never allowed to run on your PC in a normal Windows environment.

A normal Windows environment is a user account with full administrator rights. It's probably what you are using right now as it is the default setup in all recent versions of Windows up to but excluding, Windows Vista.

There are many way you can keep malware well away from your normal Windows account. Here are four:

1. Use a Windows limited user account for your daily work
2. Run all high risk programs with limited rights
3. Run all high risk programs with policy restrictions
4. Run all high risk programs in a sandbox or virtual machine

Each method has its pros and cons so let's look at them individually:

Option 1: Use a Windows limited user account for your daily work

Using a limited user account can be very effective in preventing malware infection as most malware products need full administrator rights to install themselves. In a limited account they just can't get a foothold.

It's easy to set up a limited user account. Just go the Control Panel, select User Accounts and create a new user account as a limited user. Then sign in to this account for your normal computer work rather than the account you are currently using.

Setting up a limited account may be easy but using it can be a real pain. For example you won't be able to install most programs. You won't be able to update others. You won't be able to access any part of the PC other than your own documents and the shared documents area. Heck, you won't even be able to change the system date!

Some folks can work with these limitations or work-around them by swapping to a full privilege administrator account when they need to install programs or do other more advanced tasks. Others use the Windows "Run as" command and similar utilities to temporarily elevate their privileges when needed.

Most users though, find using a limited account to be simply too awkward and inconvenient. Sure. their computer is safe but that's little comfort if their PC is only barely usable.

That said using a limited account is an excellent solution for advanced users prepared to tolerate the inconvenience or ordinary users with basic computer needs. If Granny never does anything but check her mail and browse to newspaper sites to read the headlines than setting her up with a limited account is a good way to go. Do expect phone calls though; one day even Granny is going to need to do something that requires administrator privileges.

Option 2: Run all high risk programs with limited rights

This is a more practical strategy. Run as a full administrator user but restrict the rights of all programs such as your browser and email client that can be sources of malware infection.

Getting this to work could be a complex business but thankfully there are some free utilities available that were written to perform this exact task.

The best known of these is DropMyRights. It allows users to easily create special versions of their browsers, email clients IM client, media player or other internet facing programs that run from a full administrator account but with the restricted rights of a Windows limited user.

It's a simple and neat solution that provides good protection from infection yet doesn't inconvenience the user in the same way as working from within a limited user account. I've written a practical guide to running programs using DropMyRights. You can find it here.

The approach however has some weaknesses perhaps the worst of which is downloaded files. Yes you are safe from infection while using a browser but if you run any files you download then you can easily be infected if those files contain embedded malware.

However, if you add Software Restriction Policies you restrict your computer even more so most malware will not be able to install. These two guides, here and here, are excellent instructions on how to set up Software Restriction Policies on your computer.

Option 3: Run all high risk programs with policy restrictions

There is currently only one free program which does this: GesWall free. It is similar to programs like DropMyRights but it is more secure. It works by restricting what your internet applications can do to your computer.

Another option is to use DefenseWall. It is shareware but it is the leading product in policy restrictions and extremely good security if you can afford it.

The good thing about these two applications are that it requires no user intervention, it is truly set-it-and-forget-it. It does not restrict the usablity of your whole computer (Option 1), the does not require the user spending time to configure the program (Option 2) and it does not create confusion or require manual sandboxing of applications (Option 4).

However, some users report signifcantly reduced internet connection speeds when running GesWall.

Option 4: Run all high risk programs in a sandbox or virtual machine

The strange name "sandbox" derives from the Java world where it refers to the highly contained and restricted environment in which Java programs (applets) are allowed to run. They are allowed to "play in the sandbox" but not go outside it. The important point is that while running in the sandbox, the programs have no access to your real PC.

So it is with sandbox security programs. While browsing or engaging in any computer activity within the sandbox you are totally corralled off from your other parts of your PC. Any files you download are isolated to the sandbox. Similarly, any programs that are executed only do so within the sandbox and have no access to your normal files, the Windows operating system or indeed any other part of your PC.

That means that if you get infected by malware while using the sandbox your "real" computer is nor affected. Furthermore you can close the sandbox and all that's within it is erased including any infections, leaving your real PC in a pristine state.

Sandboxing is a great security solution for preventing infection. There are also some excellent sandboxing programs around including my favorite, the donationware utility "Sandboxie." It is very light on resources, provides very strong protection and has a well-supported form. Another alternative is SafeSpace. It is currently still in beta and development has slowed down significantly recently but in addition to virtualisation it also provides some policy restrictions and an anti-keylogger. The interface is also nicer than Sandboxie.

There are some downsides. Sandboxing creates a two-worlds view of your computer and this confuses some users. They could get it wrong and think they are surfing in the sandbox when they are not - and then it's possible to become infected. This confusion is particularly evident with downloaded files. Files in the sandbox are not really permanently on your computer unless you deliberately move them from the sandbox to your real PC. If you shut the sandbox without moving them they will be lost forever.
This two-worlds view is simply too confusing for some users. A confused user is an unsafe user.

Also, if users are not thinking, they could allow every alert, which would recover files to your real environment.

And like every single other security software, some malware can still break out of sandboxes.

There are other problems too. Sandboxing is only available for PCs running Windows 2000 and later. Furthermore sandboxing can create problems on some PCs. Indeed I've known PCs to seize up totally with a sandbox installed. Luckily though, this is not common.

Another option is Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition. It works by virtualising partitions (only the local drive). When you turn the protection on (this does not require a reboot), your whole partition is virtualised and all changes made to it are lost. When you want to turn the protection off you have to restart your PC. This sounds like a great idea and it is, but there are several drawbacks. One is that it is not very flexible, all your data will be lost too (unless you manually configure some files to be excluded, but this reduces the security). Another reason is that it can still be bypassed - recently there have been several well-publicised malware exploits which can bypass its protection.

Virtual machines such as VMWare, Microsoft's Virtual PC and Sun's VirtualBox are similar to sandboxing but take the idea one step further by completely separating the virtual machine from the real PC at a conceptual level. Rather than have a sandbox as part of your real PC you have a virtual PC that is notionally fully distinct from your PC.

This difference aside these virtualization models have a lot of similarities. Infections that are incurred in the virtual machine cannot affect the real PC. Similarly shutting down the virtual PC removes all trace of infection.

Unfortunately they also share the same user confusion: "Am I in my real PC or the virtual one?"

The greater separation provided by the virtual machine approach does offer more robust security model than sandboxing but it comes at a cost. Virtual machines consume a lot of memory and a have a fair degree of processing overhead compared to sandboxing. And moving between the real and virtual machines can be more awkward than with sandboxing. Like sandboxing virtualization can be troublesome on some PCs.

From a user's perspective sandboxing or partition virtualisation are more attractive options though IT professionals would probably prefer the greater flexibility and superior isolation offered by virtual machines.

Security wise all three offer excellent protection from malware infection. The protection is so good that disciplined users don't need any other security products to protect them.
What about on-demand scanning?

OK I've come out heavily against running multiple active security products but what about passive security products like on-demand scanners?

An on-demand scan is one you manually initiate. It may be an anti-virus scanner, an anti-spyware scanner, a rootkit detector or a keylogger scanner.

I'm all for on-demand scans as, unlike using products that employ active monitoring, they don't impose an on-going overhead on your computer. The only computer power they consume is while they are actually performing a scan.

Take for example a good anti-spyware scanner like the free version of SUPERAntiSpyware or the excellent free Panda Anti-rootkit detector. They consume no computer power unless you actually run the programs. And because they are not constantly running they are less inclined to cause any problems with other programs.

So by all means runs on-demand scans periodically: weekly, monthly whatever. They are a good backstop to your anti-virus program.

Conclusion

When it comes to today's aggressive malware programs, preventing malware from ever getting on your PC is a better strategy than trying to intercept it when it tries to run.

Make sure to use a blend of different technologies and products when you use security software, not just signature scanners. Remember, absolutely no product provides 100% protection.

You can prevent malware getting on your PC by combining safe computing practices with other techniques such as reducing the privileges of high risk programs, policy restriction progams, sandboxing and the use of virtual machines.

Reducing the privileges of high risk programs is a simple workable solution for most users. Policy restrictions offer greater security and usablity than reducing priviliges, but can slow down your internet connection speed drastically. Sandboxing, virtualization and policy restrictions offer a more complete solution but are not entirely free of practical problems. For those who can work with these problems, sandboxing, other virtualization solutions and policy restrictions offer the best way currently available to prevent malware installing itself on your PC.

With these elements in place the only active security software you really need are an inbound firewall (Windows Firewall will suffice), any good anti-virus program and a behavioral blocker. That said you can, indeed should, supplement these with periodic on-demand scans of your PC with a good anti-spyware product and a good rootkit detector. These on-demand products won't impose the on-going overhead you would incur with security software that uses active monitoring.
This set up is better security than other users who employ multiple layers of real-time signature scanners. Even better your PC will run much fast; a complete contrast to machines running multiple real-time security products.

None of this comes without cost. Defensive computing requires time and discipline. Users not prepared to put in the effort are advised to stay with a layering strategy using multiple security products.

For me, the days of running five or more active security software products on my PCs are over. So your Grandmother was right: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Best Free CD / DVD Burning Software

2008-06-22T04:43:00.000-07:00

What These Products Do:

Locating quality freeware burning applications for this review proved to be a challenge, even though there were plenty of contenders. Our short list included:

AVS Disc Creator
burnatonce
Burn to the Brim
CDBurnerXP
CDR Tools Front End
CommandBurner
DeepBurner Free
Easy Burning
Express Burn
HT Fireman CD/DVD Burner
IsoRecorder
Burrn 1.14
CreateCD
DVDShrink
ImgBurn

We were also attracted to two other programs, Burn4Free and Artisan (a.k.a. Sun), but they were packaged with adware and/or spyware and were discarded.

Editor's Choice

Of all these products, the most impressive was CDBurnerXP. It possesses all of the core features you need, including:

an intuitive interface
the ability to author data discs
create audio CDs playable in a regular CD player
create bootable discs
copy discs
create and burn image files (e.g. ISO)

It passed every test we were able to throw at it: it added to a multi-session disc created on another drive with another burning application, and created a functional slip-streamed Windows XP installation CD! In addition to the core features, CDBurnerXP also has several additional features: customizable boot disc options (lacking in DeepBurner), integrated cover printing utility, integrated audio player and audio, the ability to rip audio CDs to various formats (including MP3 with CDDB lookup), and support for Double layer DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. Those of you who are familiar with Nero will feel right at home, because the interface is very similar.

Recommended Products:

All up, CDBurnerXP is a good choice for both basic and advanced users. DeepBurner Free is a close second to CDBurnerXP. If you don't author bootable CDs or care about the additional multimedia features, then DeepBurner Free might be the one for you. It has all of the core functionality, but is a much smaller download package and has a smaller installation footprint. It also offers a portable version that can be executed as a stand-alone application from a USB drive.

In addition to these products, there are several free burners that are extremely small and specialize in just one or two features. For example, Burrrn is for authoring audio CDs, CreateCD and CommandBurner offer command line burning capabilities, DVDShrink is designed for creating DVD backups, and ImgBrn and ISO Recorder are for burning images to disc with a couple clicks of the mouse. For the average user, though, CDBurnerXP or DeepBurner Free are the clear winners. Editor's note: many thanks to regular contributor Craig Vollmar for taking the time to prepare this excellent review.

Product Specifications:

CDBurnerXP
Website: http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
License: Freeware
Download File size:2.24 MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Server, Vista
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Deepburner
Website: http://www.deepburner.com/?r=products&pr=deepburner&prr=provsfree
License: Freeware
Download File size: 2.73 MB
Windows Operating Systems Supported: 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 Server
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: Yes (2.83MB)
Additional Software Required: None

Burrn 1.14
Website: http://www.burrrn.net/
License: Cardware
Download File size: 2.02 MB
Operating Systems Supported: 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: No

CreateCD
Website: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/CreateCD.htm
License: Freeware
Download File size: 50 KB
Operating Systems Supported: XP/2003/Vista
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: None

CommandBurner
Website: http://www.commandburner.com/
License: Freeware
Download File size: 2.71 MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows NT and later,
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: None

DVDShrink
Website: http://www.dvdshrink.org/ Download link removed
Download link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/CD-DVD-Rip-Other-Tools/DVD-Shrink.shtml
License: Freeware
Download File size:1.04 MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: None

ImgBurn
Website: http://www.imgburn.com/
License: Freeware
Download File size:1.5 MB
Operating Systems Supported: 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 Server, Vista
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: None

IsoRecorder
Website: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
License: Freeware for non commercial use
Download File size: 378 KB (32bit ), 398KB (64bit)
Windows Operating Systems Supported: XP/2003 Server/Vista
64 Bit Capable: Yes
Portable Version Available: No
Additional Software Required: None

How to Back up Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird

2008-06-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

Backing up Firefox and Thunderbird is easier than you think. Here Gizmo explains how.
Firefox and Thunderbird Firefox users need to regularly back up to guard against the possibility that their profile gets corrupted or wiped after installing a new extension or a new version of Firefox. If you use Thunderbird then it's even more important that you backup to ensure you don't accidentally lose your email correspondence and account settings.
There are two ways to backup: use a backup utility or do it yourself manually.
Backup Utilities
MozBackup is a free utility written by Pavel Cvrcek that will automatically backup Firefox and Thunderbird as well as Netscape and the full Mozilla suite. It works like a charm - the whole process is driven by a Wizard so easy to use that even raw beginners will be able to set up automatic backups. It also offers encryption of the backup files and a complete push-button restore option.
MozBackup only backs up the essential information rather than all the information in your Mozilla profile but that's fine for most users. You can get MozBackup here: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/index-old.html
There are also a couple of commercial utilities that will backup Firefox and Thunderbird. I've not used them but you can find details at http://www.rinjanisoft.com/ Manual Backup
Backing up Firefox and Thunderbird manually is as simple as copying their respective profile folders to another location. If you do that, you’ll have a full backup with all your setting and personal data saved.
The hard part is finding the profile folders. First up, they are not located where you would expect to find them. Secondly, they are located in different places for different versions of Windows. Thirdly, they may be assigned random file names that make them difficult to recognize.
On Windows 2000/XP machines the locations for your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles are respectively:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\\
On Windows 9x/Me PCs they can usually be found at:
C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
C:\Windows\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\\
If you can't locate your profiles then check out this document for more information: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder#What_is_in_my_profile?
On my XP laptop the profiles are:
C:\Documents and Settings\Ian\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.ebq
C:\Documents and Settings\Ian\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\25ve0lz5.default
To back these up I copy the profiles to an external USB drive. It's as simple as that. I do it manually but you could also use Windows Scheduler or a backup manager to do the job automatically. Make sure, though, that Firefox and Thunderbird are not running before you backup.

direct download-wwe raw

2008-05-26T02:42:00.000-07:00

get WWE RAW: total edition

http://files.filefront.com/WWE+RAW+Total+Edition+Ilzip/;10141270;/fileinfo.html

Best Windows Freeware/Shareware Download Sites

2008-05-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

net and CNet Downloads These two sites are just different faces of the same site. That site, however, offers the biggest collection of software on the web. Finding what you want is easy, because they have the best file search engine of them all. The user comments are useful but, beware, they are often stacked by comments made by the product developers pretending to be mere users.

MajorGeeks This site carries only tech tools and utilities and there's not a lot of guidance to help you select wisely. However, if you are looking for tech tools this is THE place to go. One of my favorites.

No-Nags Simply the best freeware-download site on the web. The shareware side is slowly being added and is not yet as impressive.

SnapFiles / WebAttack Offers a huge collection, great organization and a refreshingly clean presentation. A drawback is its somewhat unhelpful file-search facility.

FileForum-Betanews Not the largest download collection, but if you're looking for the very latest products you'll find them here long before other download sites.

Highly Recommended Sites

SoftPedia A large commercial site with a good collection of user reviews, but it's marred by lots of ads and general screen clutter.

Tucows Huge collection with world-wide mirrors for fast downloading. The Classic "cow ratings" for products are as reliable as ever. This once class-leading site has lost its way a little in recent times.

ServerFiles.com This is the old 32bit.com site re-launched as a site specializing in server software for network administrators and IT professionals. Quite a few products have ratings, some with full reviews. It's a unique offering and highly recommended if you fit the target market.

5 Star Shareware This quality UK site claims to feature only the best products in each category. And it does...almost.

VoodooFiles A specialist download site for gaming, multi-media and performance tweaking. Lots of quality reviews.

topshareware.com A good general interest download site that's competent

Recommended Sites

Shareware Junkies Every product here is independently reviewed, though many of the reviews are becoming dated. Can be helpful when you are trying to decide what you need.

Allen's WinApps List A fast and well organized site with a huge selection of software, but the search engine is woeful and there is little in the way of guidance as well.

WinPlanet
The aging remnant of the once excellent Stroud's CWS Apps site, it's now part of the Internet.com mega-site. It's still a useful site with many product ratings and some reviews. Overall, though, it is but a pale shadow of its former self.

Pass The Shareware A limited and somewhat aging collection but refreshingly free of advertising.

Football History

2008-05-02T04:02:00.000-07:00

Football

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about various sports known as "football". For information about the balls used in these sports, see Football (ball). For the different uses and meanings of the word in the English language, see Football (word).

Some of the many different codes of football.

Football is the name given to a number of different team sports, all of which involve (to varying degrees) kicking a ball with the foot in an attempt to score a goal. The most popular of these sports world-wide is association football, also known as soccer and most commonly just football. The English language word "football" is also applied to gridiron football (which includes American football and Canadian football), Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby league and rugby union), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules, or the games defined by them) is referred to as "football".

These games involve:

two teams of between 11 and 18 players
kicking a spherical or prolate spheroid ball (which is itself called a football) with the foot;
a clearly defined area in which to keep the ball;
scoring goals and/or points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field and either into a goal area, or over a line;
the goal and/or line being defended by the opposing team;
players being required to move the ball—depending on the code—by kicking, carrying and/or hand passing the ball;
goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts and;
penalties imposed for causing the ball to leave the area of play, or excessive contact with the opposing team.

In most codes, there are rules restricting the movement of players offside and players scoring a goal must put the ball either under or over a crossbar between the goalposts. Other features common to several football codes include: points being mostly scored by players carrying the ball across the goal line and; players receiving a free kick after they take a mark/make a fair catch.

Peoples from around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball, since ancient times. However, most of the modern codes of football have their origins in Europe.

Etymology

While it is widely believed that the word "football" (or "foot ball") originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is a rival explanation, which has it that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.^[1] These games were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports often played by aristocrats. While there is no conclusive evidence for this explanation, the word football has always implied a variety of games played on foot, not just those that involved kicking a ball. In some cases, the word football has even been applied to games which have specifically outlawed kicking the ball.

A 15th century woodcut depiction of cuju, from a Ming Dynasty edition of the Water Margin.

A revived version of Kemari being played at the Tanzan Shrine.

History

Early history

Ancient games

Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Warring States Period in about the 476 BC–221 BC. It describes a practice known as cuju (蹴鞠, literally "kick ball"), which originally involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30-foot (9.1 m) poles. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), cuju games were standardized and rules were established. Variations of this game later spread to Japan and Korea, known as kemari and chuk-guk respectively. By the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618–907), the feather-stuffed ball was replaced by an air-filled ball and cuju games had become professionalized, with many players making a living playing cuju. Also, two different types of goal posts emerged: One was made by setting up posts with a net between them and the other consisted of just one goal post in the middle of the field.

The Japanese version of cuju is kemari (蹴鞠), and was adopted during the Asuka period from the Chinese. This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari several people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground (much like keepie uppie). The game appears to have died out sometime before the mid-19th century. It was revived in 1903 and is now played at a number of festivals.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or phaininda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388–311 BC) and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. These games appears to have resembled rugby.

An illustration from the 1850s of Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherers. Children in the background are playing a football game, possibly Marn Grook.^[2]

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, and/or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit (Eskimo) people in Greenland.^[3] There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey of the Jamestown settlement, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. In Victoria, Australia, indigenous people played a game called Marn Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian rules football (see below).

Games played in Central America with rubber balls by indigenous peoples are also well-documented as existing since before this time, but these had more similarities to basketball or volleyball, and since their influence on modern football games is minimal, most do not class them as football.

These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football codes appear to lie in western Europe, especially England.

Medieval and early modern Europe

Further information: Medieval football

The Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England. The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the Roman occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate this. Reports of a game played in Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy, known as La Soule or Choule, suggest that some of these football games could have arrived in England as a result of the Norman Conquest.

An illustration of so-called "mob football".

These forms of football, sometimes referred to as "mob football", would be played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people, struggling to move an item such as an inflated pig's bladder, to particular geographical points, such as their opponents' church. Shrovetide games have survived into the modern era in a number of English towns (see below).

The first detailed description of football in England was given by William FitzStephen in about 1174–1183. He described the activities of London youths during the annual festival of Shrove Tuesday:

After lunch all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree adolescents.^[4]

Most of the very early references to the game speak simply of "ball play" or "playing at ball". This reinforces the idea that the games played at the time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked.

In 1314, Nicholas de Farndone, Lord Mayor of the City of London issued a decree banning football in the French used by the English upper classes at the time. A translation reads: "[f]orasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large foot balls [rageries de grosses pelotes de pee] in the fields of the public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future." This is the earliest reference to football.

The earliest mention of a ball game that involves kicking was in 1321, in Shouldham, Norfolk: "[d]uring the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his... ran against him and wounded himself".^[5]

In 1363, King Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball, football, or hockey; coursing and cock-fighting, or other such idle games", showing that "football" — whatever its exact form in this case — was being differentiated from games involving other parts of the body, such as handball.

King Henry IV of England also presented one of the earliest documented uses of the English word "football", in 1409, when he issued a proclamation forbidding the levying of money for "foteball".^[5]^[6]

There is also an account in Latin from the end of the 15th century of football being played at Cawston, Nottinghamshire. This is the first description of a "kicking game" and the first description of dribbling: "[t]he game at which they had met for common recreation is called by some the foot-ball game. It is one in which young men, in country sport, propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air but by striking it and rolling it along the ground, and that not with their hands but with their feet... kicking in opposite directions" The chronicler gives the earliest reference to a football field, stating that: "[t]he boundaries have been marked and the game had started.^[5]

Other firsts in the mediæval and early modern eras:

"a football", in the sense of a ball rather than a game, was first mentioned in 1486.^[6] This reference is in Dame Juliana Berners' Book of St Albans. It states: "a certain rounde instrument to play with ...it is an instrument for the foote and then it is calde in Latyn 'pila pedalis', a fotebal."^[5]
a pair of football boots was ordered by King Henry VIII of England in 1526.^[7]
women playing a form of football was in 1580, when Sir Philip Sidney described it in one of his poems: "[a] tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes, When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes."^[8]
the first references to goals are in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In 1584 and 1602 respectively, John Norden and Richard Carew referred to "goals" in Cornish hurling. Carew described how goals were made: "they pitch two bushes in the ground, some eight or ten foote asunder; and directly against them, ten or twelue [twelve] score off, other twayne in like distance, which they terme their Goales".^[9] He is also the first to describe goalkeepers and passing of the ball between players.
the first direct reference to scoring a goal is in John Day's play The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (performed circa 1600; published 1659): "I'll play a gole at camp-ball" (an extremely violent variety of football, which was popular in East Anglia). Similarly in a poem in 1613, Michael Drayton refers to "when the Ball to throw, And drive it to the Gole, in squadrons forth they goe".

Calcio Fiorentino

An illustration of the Calcio Fiorentino field and starting positions, from a 1688 book by Pietro di Lorenzo Bini.

Main article: Calcio Fiorentino

In the 16th century, the city of Florence celebrated the period between Epiphany and Lent by playing a game which today is known as "calcio storico" ("historic kickball") in the Piazza della Novere or the Piazza Santa Croce. The young aristocrats of the city would dress up in fine silk costumes and embroil themselves in a violent form of football. For example, calcio players could punch, shoulder charge, and kick opponents. Blows below the belt were allowed. The game is said to have originated as a military training exercise. In 1580, Count Giovanni de' Bardi di Vernio wrote Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino. This is sometimes said to be the earliest code of rules for any football game. The game was not played after January 1739 (until it was revived in May 1930).

Official disapproval and attempts to ban football

Main article: Attempts to ban football games

Numerous attempts have been made to ban football games, particularly the most rowdy and disruptive forms. This was especially the case in England and in other parts of Europe, during the Middle Ages and early modern period. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. The need to repeatedly proclaim such laws demonstrated the difficulty in enforcing bans on popular games. King Edward II was so troubled by the unruliness of football in London that on April 13, 1314 he issued a proclamation banning it: "Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future."

The reasons for the ban by Edward III, on June 12, 1349, were explicit: football and other recreations distracted the populace from practicing archery, which was necessary for war.

By 1608, the local authorities in Manchester were complaining that: "With the ffotebale...[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons ..."^[10] That same year, the word "football" was used disapprovingly by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's play King Lear contains the line: "Nor tripped neither, you base football player" (Act I, Scene 4). Shakespeare also mentions the game in A Comedy of Errors (Act II, Scene 1):

Am I so round with you as you with me,

That like a football you do spurn me thus?

You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:

If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.

"Spurn" literally means to kick away, thus implying that the game involved kicking a ball between players.

King James I of England's Book of Sports (1618) however, instructs Christians to play at football every Sunday afternoon after worship.^[11] The book's aim appears to be an attempt to offset the strictness of the Puritans regarding the keeping of the Sabbath.^[12]

Establishment of modern codes

English public schools

Main article: English public school football games

While football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain, its public schools (known as private schools in other countries) are widely credited with four key achievements in the creation of modern football codes. First of all, the evidence suggests that they were important in taking football away from its "mob" form and turning it into an organised team sport. Second, many early descriptions of football and references to it were recorded by people who had studied at these schools. Third, it was teachers, students and former students from these schools who first codified football games, to enable matches to be played between schools. Finally, it was at English public schools that the division between "kicking" and "running" (or "carrying") games first became clear.

The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools — mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle and professional classes — comes from the Vulgaria by William Horman in 1519. Horman had been headmaster at Eton and Winchester colleges and his Latin textbook includes a translation exercise with the phrase "We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde".

Richard Mulcaster, a student at Eton College in the early 16th century and later headmaster at other English schools, has been described as “the greatest sixteenth Century advocate of football”.^[13] Among his contributions are the earliest evidence of organised team football. Mulcaster's writings refer to teams ("sides" and "parties"), positions ("standings"), a referee ("judge over the parties") and a coach "(trayning maister)". Mulcaster's "footeball" had evolved from the disordered and violent forms of traditional football:

[s]ome smaller number with such overlooking, sorted into sides and standings, not meeting with their bodies so boisterously to trie their strength: nor shouldring or shuffing one an other so barbarously ... may use footeball for as much good to the body, by the chiefe use of the legges.

In 1633, David Wedderburn, a teacher from Aberdeen, mentioned elements of modern football games in a short Latin textbook called "Vocabula." Wedderburn refers to what has been translated into modern English as "keeping goal" and makes an allusion to passing the ball ("strike it here"). There is a reference to "get hold of the ball," suggesting that some handling was allowed. It is clear that the tackles allowed included the charging and holding of opposing players ("drive that man back").

A more detailed description of football is given in Francis Willughby's Book of Games, written in about 1660.^[14] Willughby, who had studied at Sutton Coldfield School, is the first to describe goals and a distinct playing field: "a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called Goals." His book includes a diagram illustrating a football field. He also mentions tactics ("leaving some of their best players to guard the goal"); scoring ("they that can strike the ball through their opponents' goal first win") and the way teams were selected ("the players being equally divided according to their strength and nimbleness"). He is the first to describe a "law" of football: "they must not strike [an opponent's leg] higher than the ball"

English public schools also devised the first offside rules, during the late 18th century.^[15] In the earliest manifestations of these rules, players were "off their side" if they simply stood between the ball and the goal which was their objective. Players were not allowed to pass the ball forward, either by foot or by hand. They could only dribble with their feet, or advance the ball in a scrum or similar formation. However, offside laws began to diverge and develop differently at the each school, as is shown by the rules of football from Winchester, Rugby, Harrow and Cheltenham, during in the period of 1810–1850.^[15]

By the early 19th century, (before the Factory Act of 1850), most working class people in Britain had to work six days a week, often for over twelve hours a day. They had neither the time nor the inclination to engage in sport for recreation and, at the time, many children were part of the labour force. Feast day football played on the streets was in decline. Public school boys, who enjoyed some freedom from work, became the inventors of organised football games with formal codes of rules.

Football was adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging competitiveness and keeping youths fit. Each school drafted its own rules, which varied widely between different schools and were changed over time with each new intake of pupils. Two schools of thought developed regarding rules. Some schools favoured a game in which the ball could be carried (as at Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham), while others preferred a game where kicking and dribbling the ball was promoted (as at Eton, Harrow, Westminster and Charterhouse). The division into these two camps was partly the result of circumstances in which the games were played. For example, Charterhouse and Westminster at the time had restricted playing areas; the boys were confined to playing their ball game within the school cloisters, making it difficult for them to adopt rough and tumble running games.

Rugby School

William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, is said to have "with a fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time [emphasis added], first took tha ball in his arms and ran with it, thus creating the distinctive feature of the rugby game." in 1823. This act is usually said to be the beginning of Rugby football, but there is little evidence that it occurred, and most sports historians believe the story to be apocryphal. The act of 'taking the ball in is arms' is often misinterpreted as 'picking the ball up' as it is widley believed that Webb Ellis' 'crime' was handling the ball, as in modern soccer, however handling the ball as the time was often permitted and in some cases compulsory ^[16] , the rule for which Webb Ellis showed disregard was running forward with it as the rules of his time only allowed a player to retreat backwards or kick forwards.

The boom in rail transport in Britain during the 1840s meant that people were able to travel further and with less inconvenience than they ever had before. Inter-school sporting competitions became possible. However, it was difficult for schools to play each other at football, as each school played by its own rules.

Apart from Rugby football, the public school codes have barely been played beyond the confines of each school's playing fields. However, many of them are still played at the schools which created them (see Surviving public school games below).

Review: Best Free Disk Defraggers

2008-04-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

Review: Best Free Disk Defraggers

Foreword from Gizmo

The idea behind file defragmentation is simple enough. Over time as a disk drive become full and space becomes scarce files may have to be stored in several separate physical locations on the drive rather than in a single contiguous location. Normal day to day work activities such as creating, modifying and deleting files further add to this process of breaking up files.

This splitting up of files into separate bits on a disk is called fragmentation. Fragmentation degrades disk performance because it takes longer to retrieve a file that scattered in pieces all over a hard drive than it does to retrieve one that is located in a single location.

File defraggers work by scanning the disk and pulling together all the separate bits. In theory this should improve performance.

And so it does. However with modern multi-head disks with large buffers and intelligent electronics this gain is smaller than you might think, often only a few percent.

Modern defraggers however, do more than defragment; they also attempt to optimize file location for maximum performance. Different products use different optimization methods but a common technique is to place the most frequently used files at the outer edge of the hard drive where data transfer rates are highest due to the higher rotational speed of the disk.

By combining file location optimization with file defragmentation higher performance gains may be possible. Much depends on the actual hard drive model, the optimization method used, the size distribution of the files and the frequency with which particular files are accessed.

What can be said is that defragmentation will almost always improve performance. Just how much is a separate question. By and large users tend to overestimate the gains. In practice a drive in a home PC that is defragmented daily is unlikely to show any noticeable performance gain over one that is defragmented weekly. What is true is that a drive that have never been defragmented will show real performance gains when it is first defragged. However subsequent regular defrags may produce only marginal additional gains.

In my experience monthly defrags are about right for the average user. Addition defrags produce little performance improvement but can add to the wear and tear on your disk. Environments that demand very high disk performance or have high file churn rates may benefit from more regular defrags but these tend to be found in commercial applications rather than on home machines.

The Best Free Disk Defragmenters

I was recently asked by Gizmo to complete a user review on free hard disk defragmenters, to which I happily obliged. Four different products were provided for me to test, in addition to the stock defragmenter that ships with Windows.

All products were tested on a Windows XP Home Edition PC with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB RAM, a 64 MB NVIDIA graphics card, and an old, 20 GB Fujitsu hard drive installed just for the occasion. Acronis True Image 7 was used to hold a well-fragmented copy of Windows, which was restored prior to the installation of each product to ensure equal testing conditions.

In these tests I've used boot time as the measure of performance. It should be a fair indicator of overall system performance but it is possible other measures such as average file access time may give a different picture.

Many people will be familiar with Windows' Disk Defragmenter, which the program I tried first. It uses Windows' inbuilt GUI; not designed for looks. It is plain, but simple and to the point. The legend is comprised of four colors, giving a vague, visual representation of fragmented files, contiguous files, system files, and free space on the drive. A full defragmentation of approximately four gigabytes of data reduced average boot time by 5 seconds (7.8%) compared to the un-defragmented disk.

The next product to be tested was Diskeeper Lite version 7, an older, feature-reduced version of the commercial Diskeeper 2007 program. This product is no longer available from the Diskeeper site but is available from many download sites.

From start to finish, this one relentlessly nags you to buy the full version. Any fancy features you might want to try out will throw up a reminder that this feature is only available in the full version, which you can buy right now by clicking this button. Nevertheless, this annoyance aside, there is one thing Diskeeper Lite can do and that's to defragment your hard drive. And it does this best out of all the freebies, reducing boot time by 7 seconds (10.9%).

Next came Auslogics Disk Defrag 1.1. As far as looks go, the interface in this one was my favorite. It is clean and professional, complete with pie graphs and bar graphs which illustrate the ratio of used space to free space (already available in Windows Explorer), as well as a before-and-after comparison to indicate perceived improvement of drive performance. This product was Diskeeper's runner-up, reducing average boot time by 6 seconds (9.4%). It was also one of the fastest, taking 12 minutes, 25 seconds for a full defragmentation.

The next contender to be tested was IObit Smart Defrag Beta 2.01. When I saw its fully loaded console and unreserved features, including automation and defragmentation of system files, I truly rooted for this one. Unfortunately, we don't always get what we want, and IObit ultimately failed to please. The only method that worked without any problems on my test machine was the express defragmentation, which ran faster than any other product (12 minutes, 3 seconds), but reduced boot time by an unimpressive 4 seconds (6.3%). Two other tests were conducted, including a comprehensive defragmentation, and an express defrag with system directories included. Both of these methods completely disabled Windows Logoff, and the system could not be shut down or rebooted save by a hard shutdown. As a result, boot times were highly inconsistent and mostly worsened, ranging from 60 to 70 seconds and 67 to 75 seconds, respectively. Of course this is a Beta version, so we can hope these bugs will be worked out.

Last to be tested amongst the freebies was JkDefrag by J.C. Kessels. This one, while not an outstanding performer, quite impressed me. It comes in three versions: a Windows version, a command line version for scheduling, and a screensaver version for defragging during idle time. The Windows version was the one tested. It automatically defragmented all of the drives it detected, including my flash drive and my external USB hard drive on which I was holding the install files. Boot time was reduced by 5 seconds (7.8%). This defragmenter actually fits on a floppy disk or any other portable device, and doesn't require installation. In the cases of the command line and screensaver versions, it's merely a case of copy-paste and manual configuration.

Commercial Comparisons

Of course the Windows' stock defragger gives us some kind of a yardstick against which to measure these four freebies, so at least we have some idea as to whether we're improving things or taking a step backwards. But it would also make sense if we could see just how they measure up against a top commercial product.

At Gizmo's request, I added industry leader Raxco PerfectDisk v8.0, build 48 to the running. It tied with Diskeeper, leader of the freeware pack, reducing average boot time by 7 seconds (10.9%). Defragmentation took much longer than that of any of the freebies, with duration of 42 minutes, 31 seconds. While it is possible that this additional time could yield benefits in actual application performance, I have no way of measuring this.

Following the initial defragmentation, an offline defrag was conducted, including the system files and pagefile. Similarly as with IObit's free beta, the only freeware defragmenter to include system files, boot time was again prolonged, rather than reduced. However unlike IOBit, PerfectDisk's job did not cripple Windows Logoff, and average boot time stayed pretty much consistent at 1 minute, 8 seconds (4 second increase, -6.3%).

Summary Table

	Scheduling	Offline defrag	Boot time after defrag (base=1':04')	Time to defrag
Windows Defrag	X	X	0':59"	22':18'
Diskeeper 7 Lite	X	X	0':57"	23':01"
Auslogics	X	X	0':58"	12:25"
IOBit	√	√	1':00"	12':03"
JKDefrag	√	X	0':59"	22':20"
Perfect Disk 8 (commercial)	√	√	0':57"	42':31"

Conclusion

All the products tested including the inbuilt Windows defragger reduced the boot time of the fragmented system disk used in this test. However the improvement was modest rather than huge. Of the free products tested Diskeeper 7 Lite produced the biggest improvement though to be honest, the margin between all the products was small. A final choice may rest more on features and the ease of use rather than performance. In the end the compact JKDefrag was the product that I liked most but your choice may well be different.

Preventing Computer Related Neck and Shoulder Problems

2008-04-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

Preventing Computer Related Neck and Shoulder Problems

Anyone who uses a computer for long periods is at risk of developing neck, shoulder and back problems. Humans simply aren’t designed to sit immobile for long periods of time staring at a screen.

We have all been told about the importance of correct ergonomic positions, getting the right chair, sitting with your back straight. We've all seen those nice diagrams of the lady sitting bolt upright, arms level with the keyboard with everything in the right ergonomic relationship.

But, as far as I'm concerned, that's a bunch of hooey.

Most people just don't work like that. Maybe for 10 ten minutes but after that they slouch. And when you slouch the problems start.

Those problems certainly started for me. It got to the point where I couldn't work for more than an 30 minutes at a time. I tried everything to solve the problem. For months I looked for solutions. Finally, I found two things that really worked.

Solution 1

The first was to throw out my expensive, ergonomically designed chair and to replace it with a cheap fitness ball. You know, those big plastic exercise balls you see in gyms.

For the first two days I used the ball my stomach muscles were sore. That's because my body core muscles had to work constantly to keep me sitting balanced on the ball without falling off. That's good news. Strengthening your core muscles really helps your back. From a geeks' viewpoint it's even better; it means you are getting a workout without even knowing it!

I don't know enough about physiology to tell you exactly why using a ball as a chair works. What I do know is that it's hard to slouch while sitting on a ball. I also know that using a ball for a seat worked wonders for me and every other person I know with computer related back, shoulder and neck problems.

Here's a link to a site that claims to explain what is happening, though this may be just hooey as well. However, the site also offers advice on selecting the correct size ball and that is definitely useful. They aslo show you some excellent exercises you can do on the ball while seated.
http://www.mercola.com/2005/jul/2/sit_exercise.htm

Here’s a photo of my desk and ball chair and my general computer setup:

You can see from the photo that my ball chair seems quite high relative to my desk. That’s because I have it inflated to a lower pressure than you would normally use in an exercise ball; it’s softer that way and easier on my butt. As a result of the lower pressure, the ball sags a little when I sit on it, hence the need for a bit more height.

You’ll also notice that I have my laptop right at the edge of my desk. That stops me slouching by leaning on my elbows.

A subscriber to my newsletter recently wrote in to tell me about a chair that utilizes the same principal. It's called a BalanceBall chair. I haven't tried it but it looks pretty impressive. It certainly solves the problem of your gym ball rolling around all over the place when you are not sitting on it!

The chair is self assembled and sells for around $79. More details here: http://www.gaiam.com/retail/product.asp?product%5Fid=95-1004

Note that I don't make any commission on this :>)

Solution 2

The second thing I did to solve my neck problems was to eliminate the need to turn my head sideways.

Like a lot of computer dudes, I use two computers at one time. These were placed side by side so a lot of turning was involved moving from machine to machine.

The same applies if you work with a single computer but have your paper documents alongside your keyboard. Lots of head turning.

What I did was change my computers so the monitors were aligned vertically. I did this by sitting one monitor on a box so that it is directly above my laptop screen. You can see how I did it in the photo.

My second monitor is a CRT not an LCD. I prefer the CRT for its more accurate color rendition. If your second monitor is an LCD you’ll probably find it even easier to align vertically above your main screen.

I operate both PCs from my laptop keyboard and mouse. Rather than use a KVM switch I use a free open source program called Synergy to switch between PCs using my local network.

Synergy is quite neat, really. When I move my mouse up the laptop screen it disappears when it reaches the top of the screen and then immediately re-appears on the bottom of screen on the top monitor and vice versa when I move the mouse down.

When the mouse is active in the top screen my laptop keyboard is connected to the top PC. When I slide the mouse down to my laptop screen the laptop keyboard is automatically reconnected to the laptop. It's automatic and seamless.

Even better, I can cut and paste from one PC to the other just by moving the mouse between screens.

What this means is that now I hardly ever need to turn my head sideways. I work pretty well exclusively in a vertical plane.

If you have only one PC but work off paper documents, you can achieve the same thing by placing your paper documents on a typing stand above your PC monitor. Again you will be working in a vertical plane.

I can't say whether this will help your particular neck problems as no two folks are the same. All I can say is that it worked wonders for me and is definitely worth trying.

And if you use two PCs do try Synergy rather than a KVM. This I can assure you WILL work wonders.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Freeware, All Windows versions, Unix, Linux, Mac OS X.

How to Use Mouse Shortcuts

2008-04-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

Now this is a subject area I hadn't even considered until I got an email from South African subscriber Cobus Jacobs.

Cobus had just read my article on keyboard shortcuts in #139 and wrote in to suggest three tips for use on any mouse with a scrolling wheel. Here's what he had to say:

"1. In addition to the usual up-and-down scrolling, you can hold shift while scrolling to scroll side-ways (very handy in big spreadsheets or Windows Explorer in the details/list view).

2. In most applications that have a zoom feature such as MS Office Suite, Acrobat Reader and IrfanView, holding down Ctrl while scrolling will zoom in and out. Sure it's just as easy as clicking the zoom-icon, but it becomes especially useful when throwing a spreadsheet/pdf in full-screen mode during a presentation. Suddenly your toolbar is gone, no worries, just ctrl-scroll away!

3. Clicking your wheel-button usually results in your mouse cursor changing shape; typically a round circle with arrows in it. Now you can scroll in any direction using mouse movement instead of rolling the wheel. Clicking the wheel again returns your mouse to its trusty cursor."

Cobus goes on to correctly point out these features are dependent on your mouse driver however they will work with most including the default settings for just about all Logitech drivers.

Of course, many drivers allow the customization of the function of mouse buttons but most users have never delved into the options available in their mouse software. Check out the Mouse applet in Windows Control Panel; you may be surprised what you find.

To me the most effective mouse shortcuts of all are mouse gestures, that is the use of specific movements of the mouse to perform a command. They take a little time to get used to but once you do you'll wonder how you worked without them, particularly for web navigation.

My favorite utility for implementing gestures is StrokeIt. It's easy to use, easy to train and comes with over 80 pre-programmed gestures that work with many popular applications. It's also free for personal use and works with all Windows versions from Windows 98 onwards. Be warned, though; if you try it you may well find yourself addicted. :>)

How good is the Latest security.??

2008-04-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Part 1 - Is there Truth in Numbers?

Security expert Bruce Scheiner talks about the ‘security theatre’, where vendors make their customers feel secure ‘by offering protection against threats that were not that great in the first place.’ He adds that ‘buyers can’t tell the difference between good and bad [products]’ and that many security vendors ‘play on emotion and fear’.

That about sums up the state of affairs. The old mafia families Norton, McAfee and Trend Micro have sold millions of clunky products to fearful consumers. In recent years, cheeky newcomers have muscled in on the old mafia’s turf, promising better protection and milder manners.

Symantec responded by claiming that a new version of Norton, the elephant in the PC security room, could dance like a ballerina, while McAfee and Trend Micro put on more weight and lumbered on. Zone Labs’ newer security suite flattered the old guard by matching their bulk. Then Microsoft decided to get into the security race and promptly collapsed on the first lap, winning the wooden spoon in the VB 100 tests.

Microsoft changed the rules, though, adding PC maintenance and file backup to its list of features. Symantec and McAfee, faced with the biggest threat they’d ever detected, readied new products to take on Windows Live-One Care. Microsoft tightened the screws some more, claiming that Vista was so secure it needed no extra guards.

With their turf under threat from two sides, the old mafia families decided to make their offers harder to refuse. They threw in three security guards for the price of one and added other attractions like parental control and phishing protection.

No Surety in Security

Security was always too arcane for ordinary folks to get their heads around. Finding decent anti-malware programs is a lot like finding a good dentist: in both cases, you don’t know how painful they can be until you’re in the hot seat. And there’s no easy way to establish the long term worth of the short term pain.

Independent test labs offer some insights for the diligent, but some of them simply certify products for a fee paid by vendors keen to put reassuring stickers on their boxes. Even the real tests are hardly representative of the real world, since the vendors all have a copy of the script, like actors rehearsing for a play.

PC magazines and tech websites run regular security reviews but few have any real capacity for testing AV-products. PC Magazine and Australian PC User do. PCWorld gets AV-Test.org to run tests for them. A few technology veterans do their own tests, among them Neil Rubenking, the eminence grise of security at PC Magazine, Robert Vamosi at CNET, Gizmo at Techsupportalert.com and Scot Finney at Scot’s Newsletter.

Sadly, there’s a whiff of suspicion that advertisers influence the results of certain publications, so I tend to rely on Gizmo and Scot more than the rest (since they’re independent spirits). A few websites that review security products even have affiliate links with AV-vendors and get kick-backs out of every click on links to their products.

Most test labs only reveal their results for payment, but those of Virus Bulletin are often published by vendors who do well. AV-Test.org’s results are just as hard to come by, and Check-Vir only publishes overall ratings on its website. That leaves AV-Comparatives as the one independent lab that provides the full details on its website, http://www.av-comparatives.org

After some diligent digging, I’ve managed to come up with these product rankings:

	AV-Comp	PCWorld	Check-Vir	(AV-Test.org)
Antivir (paid)	Advanced +			2
AVG (paid)	Advanced +	recommended	Standard	6
Bitdefender	Advanced +	Top score		1
F-Secure	Advanced +			4
Kaspersky	Advanced +	Top score		3
NOD32	Advanced +	Top score	Advanced
Norton	Advanced +	Top score	Standard	7
McAfee	Advanced		Advanced
Trend Micro	Standard	recommended	Standard
CA (e-Trust)	Below Standard		Standard	5
Avast (paid)	Advanced	recommended
Panda	Not tested	recommended	Standard
Bullguard	Not tested		Advanced
Microsoft	Standard			8

Notes

1. AV-Comparatives uses a 3-tier rating system.

a) Most products are tested in ‘comparatives’ but Trend Micro and CA were tested on their own. TM scraped into a Standard rating but CA didn’t make the grade.

b) Panda and Bullguard are not included in tests.

c) Newcomers like Comodo and Clam-Win, tested in a separate group, posted results that were even less impressive.

2. PCWorld uses AV-Test.org but presumably also evaluates other aspects of security suites There’s just one point separating the top 4 here, then a big gap to the rest, that’s why I split them into ‘top score’ and ‘recommended’. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130869/article.html

3. Check-Vir uses a simple 2-tier rating system and doesn’t publish details.

4. AV-Test.org lists products in order of performance, lower being better here.

5. I’ve excuded Trustport, Fortinet and Webwasher (all top-rated by several labs) from this review since they are aimed more at the business market.

6. Gdata’s AVK (AntiVirusKit) also rates highly but was difficult to find English language reviews on (more below).

Looking for Consistent Results

The AV-Test.org results stand in stark contrast to the PCWorld rankings posted a few months earlier this year (2007). It was hard to believe that Microsoft came in ahead of NOD32, McAfee, Trend Micro and Sophos, even for Andreas Marx who heads up AV-Test.org. The best he could do was to suggest ‘that the high amount of malware researchers Microsoft has hired from other AV companies (including many people from Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, F-Secure and CA) has paid off.’

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-039-s-Security-Solutions-Explode-Top-Sophos-Nod32-McAfee-and-Trend-Micro-63834.shtml

‘We are not convinced!’ as German foreign Minister Joshka Fischer said to Donald Rumsfeld when he was rounding up allies for the invasion of Iraq. After all, Microsoft’s offering has bombed out in other tests, like those run by Virus Bulletin.

AV-Comparatives publishes all the gory details of its extensive tests but asks that other sites link only to their main page, http://www.av-comparatives.org/ , that’s the reason I’ve not provided direct links to specific pages in this article. Clicking on ‘comparatives’ (on the left) takes visitors to a listing of all available test reports.

It’s encouraging to find that the top 4 in the PCWorld test all score an Advanced+ rating with AV-comparatives, and few would argue with a top list that includes Bitdefender, Kaspersky, NOD32 and Norton.

AV-Test.org has AntiVir and F-Secure in the top 4, along with Bitdefender and Kaspersky. Gizmo rates Antivir among the top products (NOD32 and Kaspersky being the other two), and Scot Finney chose F-Secure as his AV of 2006 until it proved too intolerant of other security products. Scot’s choice for 2007 is NOD32, which tends to cause no conflicts with other programs.

A Different Ballgame

In ‘on demand’ tests, AV-Comparatives feeds thousands of bad bugs to various malware engines. AV-C also runs proactive/ retrospective tests, which are more revealing. This test uses versions of products that have not been updated for 3 months to see how good their heuristics are at catching malware that has surfaced since the last updates. Highest is best here.

Antivir	71%	Standard	(penalized for high rate of false positives)
NOD32	68%	Advanced +
Bitdefender	48%	Standard	(penalized for high rate of false positives)
Kaspersky	35%	Standard
F-Secure	31%	Advanced
AVAST	26%	Advanced
Norton	24%	Advanced
McAfee	24%	Advanced
Microsoft	18%	Standard
AVG	8%	No rating	(poor detection and high false positives)

Top Guns

We now have a fair degree of consensus on the top 4 and, taking other scores into account, we should probably add Norton and F-Secure to make up the top 6:

AntiVir

Bitdefender

F-Secure

Kaspersky

NOD32

Norton

The inclusion of Norton will raise hairs on the necks of many users, while the exclusion of McAfee will raise some eyebrows. To see if the old families have really changed their ways, as some reviewers claim, I take a look at them in the last section (3).

Trend Micro has won a place among the big three, but its poor record in independent tests makes it hard to take seriously for anything but its marketing muscle.

Zone Alarm Internet Security is a recent addition in its current form (with Kaspersky’s AV and MailFrontier Spam Filter) and doesn’t (yet) tend to feature in independent tests. That hasn’t stopped it winning some big fans, among them Brian Livingstone of Windows Secrets and Robert Vamosi at CNET who gives it 8/10. 175 CNET readers give it 4.9/10. This kind of discrepancy between editorial ratings and real-world experience is common.

A few months back, I found ZAISS 7 a big drag – a 3 minute boot time on XP is Theatre of the Absurd. I checked on ZAISS 7.1 Vista reviews and it seems that making ZAISS work on Vista required brutal surgery by its makers.

According to Davey Winder at PC Pro, ‘the casualties include IM security, privacy controls, ID lock, spy site blocking, ad blocking, cache cleaning, mobile code control, MailSafe protection and parental controls.’ Despite the extensive liposuction, Winder complained that ‘the performance of our Vista test PC ... went through the floor. Most obvious was the increase in boot time for Vista itself, up from a couple of minutes to ten minutes. Compared with Norton 360, the resource usage was also poor and apps took longer to start up.’

That made it easy to cross ZAISS off my list. I also tried hard to get some intelligence on GData’s (AVK) Internet Security 2008, to help me decide if it was worth checking out. The German PC mag Computer Bild rated it tops but its summary gave a clue to the suite’s dark side: ‘Höchste Sicherheit mit hohem Ressourcenhunger,’ translating to ‘high security with a vast appetite for resources.’

The complaints from users on German forums confirm that this is the battleship Bismarck of security suites. The download is a staggering 310MB, bigger than some Linux distros I’ve tested. What do you get with it? 6 kilos of Bratwurst and a Litre of Bier?

New tricks

Gdata’s suite is one of several who try to improve their detection rates by employing twin scanning engines (Kaspersky and Bitdefender in this case). F-Secure and Trustport also use more than one engine. This trend has a predictable impact on performance, but most security products are designed more with an eye on VB100 awards than on real world threats – that’s where the theatre comes in.

Gizmo and others have shown that combining different layers of security tends to produce better results overall, and this even holds true when the individual layers are free products like AVG and Threatfire, a HIPS product. Their combined footprint is much smaller than that of the twin-engine machines.

Part 2 - How they Look, Feel and Work

That’s all I can evaluate. I don’t have malware samples to spike my test PC with and, after running ESET’s Smart Security beta on it for a while, it’s cleaner than a nun’s starched bonnet. I know that because not one of the security suites I installed found a single piece of suspect code. That says a lot for ESET, since I visited some dodgy sites and clicked on some of those flashing signs that tell you that you’re the 1,000,000^th visitor and a big prize awaits you.

The test machine I’m using here is a Presario V3000 with twin AMD Turion cpus and 1GB of RAM. It runs Vista Business surprisingly well after exhaustive tweaking. With ESET Smart Security on board, Vista gets to the login screen in 40 seconds, and the desktop settles down less than a minute after that – 1 minute 30 seconds from boot.

ESET Smart Security

The suite adds a firewall and spam filter to a new version of NOD32. I recently tested a beta version (http://www.techsupportalert.com/review-eset-smart-security-suite.php ) and felt that ESS had set a benchmark for design, simplicity and slick operation. John Hawes at Virus Bulletin said this in the conclusion of his review:

"As vendors release their latest 2008 product ranges, the addition of new supplementary modules seems to be all the rage, most suites now sprawling with diverse functionality, often at the expense of user-friendliness and occasionally posing dangers of their own.

“ESET has resisted the temptation to sprinkle in too many extras, focusing instead on the core requirements of a security system. Covering all the essential bases with a smoothly integrated set of protective barriers, the combination of top-of-the-range detection, response time, heuristics and throughput with excellent presentation and design will make Smart Security pretty hard to beat."

We look at some of the kitchen sink brigade in section 3 - Norton 360, McAfee Total Protection 2008 and Avanquest System Suite 8. In this section, we check out products on our top list that focus on core security.

AVIRA Premium Security Suite

My fling with Avira was frustrating because it refused to show me its attractions at first. The download of the trial version was less than 20mb and the install took minutes, but it wouldn’t update. It wouldn’t do much else either.

The reason? ‘... feature not supported in the demo version.’ I couldn’t enable the firewall and other features for the same reason.

I did the install again, thinking I must’ve missed something. I was encouraged to enter a licence key but Avira hadn’t sent me one, and the helpful suggestion to look in the download file for a licence folder turned into a wild goose chase.

Back at the Avira website, I found an invitation for a test licence, which led to a list of products that didn’t include the one I had downloaded. I was about to call the whole thing off when I tripped over the option of a test licence key that was valid for a generous 90 days. Once you enter your name and email address, the key is sent to you with a link explaining that you need to save it in a folder from which the installer can retrieve it.

There’s also an option of activating the licence key after installation but the instructions were confusing. Obviously Avira is trying to get around the problem many users have copying a licence key into a box (you wouldn’t believe how many do), but the attempt is flawed.

The install took just over five minutes and the reboot was fairly quick. The user interface isn’t the best I’ve seen lately but it’s straightforward enough, with the buttons on the top row providing easy access to all the settings. There’s a choice between standard and expert mode, a feature I found and liked in ESS.

The suite includes the WebGuard real-time monitor, adware blocking, protection from phishing, spyware protection, spam filtering and parental control. The firewall pops its head up a lot until it builds its white list of commonly used apps. Mailguard doesn’t integrate with Opera Mail, the client I’m using on Vista, but none of the others do either. POP3 mail seems to get checked, however.

Task Manager reveals just two Avira programs weighing a featherweight 16mb. There’s no performance drag and that makes this suite easy to like. I ran a full scan to see how fast it was - a boot sector scan is an option that will please serious types. Apart from Vista, I have just 1.5 gb of data on this PC, but it took 45 minutes, about the same time it took ESS.

That was no surprise as AV-comparatives lists AntiVir at the top of the scanning speed race, just ahead of ESET’s NOD32. It’s always reassuring to confirm academic findings in real life.

The scan panel on the right shows Avira’s attempt to add a bit of fun to the boring business of malware detection.

The good news is that you can keep working while AntiVir is scanning your files. Things slow down a little but not so much that working becomes a drag.

There isn’t much I can add or pick on. Some updates were fast and others took minutes, getting in the way with notification panels. Apart from that, Avira’s is a no-nonsense suite with all the essentials and none of the garnish that adorns some competitors. It just works and doesn’t mind sharing the house with Windows Defender or Threatfire from PC-Tools. It’s very similar to ESS in many ways, except for the slower updates and an interface that could do with a fresh coat of paint. There’s also a free version of AntiVir, Personal Edition Classic, http://www.free-av.com/

Kapersky Internet Security V7

Guys in the know put Kaspersky and ESET NOD32 on the top shelf, and some claim that the Russian is the tougher of the two. At 25mb, the download isn’t that much bigger than ESS or Avira, and it’s a similar 5 minute install. After the reboot, however, Vista was slow to get going, my few icons and Google’s sidebar taking minutes to stumble onto the desktop like sleepy kids to the breakfast table.

I discovered that KIS was scanning files without asking me first, like the KGB (I have a system meter in my sidebar that tells me these things). The estimated time for the scan was 45 minutes but KIS was finished in about 20 minutes. Kaspersky’s scanner is not admired for its speed, so I assume that this was a ‘quick scan’. Editors note: Kaspersky is much quicker on subsequent scans at it does not rescan unchanged files - Gizmo.

Reboot, check the time: we get to the login panel in 50 seconds, and the desktop is ready 2 minutes after reboot. That’s a bit slower than ESS and Avira, but not intolerable.

The GUI is fresh, inviting and well-laid out. No problems finding your way around here. That makes Kaspersky suitable for average users yet leaves a battery of settings for power users who want ultimate control. Help is context-sensitive, and there’s a 320-page PDF manual for those who really want to know everything.

The firewall in KIS is another slow learner. You can turn ‘Training’ off, but then it reverts to ‘low security’. They seem to be the only choices here, which is dumb. Add-ons like parental control and web guard feel like add-ons. According to PC User, the spam filter KIS provides ‘achieved the worst results for any suite we tested’.

At first, I noticed little impact on performance. Footprint is modest at a bit over 30mb.

As I worked with KIS for a time, I notice that the laptop slowed down at various times for no apparent reason. KIS appeared to be scanning or doing something behind my back, I’m not sure what because KIS wouldn’t tell.

Like the AV suites of a by-gone era, KIS still lets you create a rescue disk along with an option to restore the operating system back to a time just before an infection. That process involves using Bart’s PE Builder, which is hardly a tool for the uninitiated.

For me, the blessings here were a little mixed – strong qualities let down by a stubborn firewall and inconsistent performance. More work is needed to bring the add-ons up to the same level as the basics and provide better integration. Scanning speed isn’t said to be KIS’ forte either, despite the good time it posted here. A skinnable interface is little compensation since there’s nothing wrong with the standard one. Does anyone except an AVAST! user really waste time re-skinning their AV?

User reviews of KIS on the internet cover a gulf with ‘fantastic’ on one side and ‘abysmal’ on the other, some folks issuing dire warnings that KIS gets its claws too deeply into the OS and damages vital organs. I found no issues removing KIS from my machine, and no problems have surfaced since.

F-Secure Internet Security 2008

This twin engine job is a bit of a wring-in but it doesn’t fit in with the ‘kitchen sink’ brigade covered in Part 3 of this survey. F-Secure was Scot Finney’s choice last year, and the picky Neil Rubenking gives it a better score than ESET Smart Security.

The download is a hefty 86mb yet the install is straightforward enough and all over in about 7 minutes. After the reboot, F-Secure takes its time to settle into Vista – 2 to 3 minutes the first time – and it won’t update until I prod it a couple of times. When that’s done, it wants to restart and I wonder if this suite is modelled on Norton.

I’m surprised when it starts faster this time, and appears to use a modest amount of RAM. Vista soaks up about 500mb and ESS adds another 30. F-Secure looks about the same on the meter in my sidebar yet Task Manager shows 15 processes that chew up more than 100mb of RAM. Where does this suite hide its flab?

I can’t figure it out but, when I work online F-Secure gums up the pipeline right away. F-Secure promises its customers 'online well-being' but well-being seems to come at a price here. Programs get the third degree too before they’re allowed to get going, courtesy of DeepGuard.

This is F-Secure’s name for pro-active, behaviour-based protection. According to F-Secure, DeepGuard monitors program activity on the host PC, detecting and prohibiting suspicious program behaviour from code that may have slipped through during real-time monitoring.

That statement puzzles me since proactive protection surely implies real-time monitoring. Suites like ESS do this (with ThreatSense) and let you choose what you want monitored – unwanted or suspicious programs – with a simple box tick. ThreatSense includes a tiny sandbox where compressed or disguised bits of code are unpacked and forced to execute in real-time and reveal their true intentions.

F-Secure’s firewall white-lists the apps you’re using and doesn’t keep asking the same dumb questions. The GUI makes it pretty easy to find your way around. Parental Control seems to be a strong point here, offering more settings than a gala dinner. Apart from that, the interface is pretty straightforward.

F-Secure’s strengths seem to be its spyware protection and firewall. The suite feels solid, is easy enough to use and caused no conflicts with other programs on my laptop, but the performance impact was noticeable online and the scan speed pretty slow. It took an hour to scan the laptop, perhaps a sign that those multiple engines are working in sequence.

There were no problems uninstalling it, but I didn’t shed a tear in the process. F-Secure doesn’t do any more than the other contenders in this group, which makes you wonder why it is so much bigger. My guess is that it’s a product of the school that says two fences are better than one at keeping out the dingos. I’d rather have one that does the job properly.

Bitdefender Internet Security 2008

This guy hails from Softwin in Romania. BitDefender is a 40mb download and installs in 5 minutes, then takes another 5 minutes to update the signatures. It tells me that it needs to turn the Windows firewall and Windows Defender off to avoid conflicts.

A reboot throws up a few panels that make you wish for more than one set of eyes.

Bitdefender’s firewall didn’t seem cooperative at first but eventually sorted itself out. Once it had, it got in the way a lot while it was learning my online habits. It never stopped learning during the few days I ran it, and there was no sign of the 1,000 safe programs it claims to have inbuilt rules for.

Start-up is a bit slow, taking over 2 minutes to a working desktop. A nag panel pops up every time you start Windows, reminding you that this is a trial version. That gets annoying after a while. Avira, ESS and Kaspersky are easier to get on with in this regard.

Coming to grips with Bitdefender proved pretty straightforward. The interface has had a major overhaul and now copies Norton’s simple new look, which makes it easy for simple users to find their way around.

For users who want to fine-tune the suite, there are lots of settings to play with behind the scenes. A slider lets you pick the security level you want under the various headings, and you need to set it on aggressive to get the full metal jacket. Then Bitdefender scans all Web traffic, which tends to make the firewall bob up and down like a yoyo and slow your system down a bit.

In the default mode, there’s little impact on performance, and Task Manager shows just 4 services taking up a miniscule 10mb of RAM. There’s a ‘game mode’ option that stops pop-ups, alerts and updates getting in the way. That’s one way to stop the interference if you’re prepared to live with reduced security.

The scanner took 5 minutes to get through 1.5gb of documents (I didn’t feel like going through another full scan of the C drive). There are big variations in scan speed among these products, as shown in the throughput figures posted on AV-comparatives:

AntiVir 7.5 mb/sec

ESET NOD32 7.3

KIS 3.5

Bitdefender 2.0

F-Secure 1.5

Bitdefender is another suite that includes all the essential security features and does a good job from all accounts. To me it lacked character, a distinct flavour of any kind. Bitdefender’s was an unengaging performance somehow, mostly colourless, annoying at times like someone who tries too hard to impress.

Summary

Have these suites muddled my mind, I hear you ask. You expect character from an AV suite? Yes, I do. This is theatre, remember? There’s ESS, the iron fist in the velvet glove; Kaspersky, the serious Russian with the 320 page manual and Bart’s PE builder; F-Secure, the over-engineered white-blue Scandinavian ice castle; Avira, the tidy, efficient German who tries hard to be funny; Norton, the mafia standover merchant. They’re all actors, and they all know their roles. Bitdefender didn’t seem sure, but that’s no slur on his efficiency.

In the last couple of years, the security firms have made big strides on two fronts: They’ve paid serious attention to their user interfaces, and not before time. No longer are simple users confronted by panels of secret code buttons that open doors to swamps infested by alien creatures. It’s still theatre, but the sets and costumes are much easier on the eyes.

There’s almost a degree of unity creeping into the layouts of their GUIs, suggesting that conventions have at last been established. Some of the newcomers even offer toggle switches for simple and advanced users, a concept that should be embraced by all software vendors. In this arena, it means that the best PC security suites on the market are at last intelligible by ordinary mortals.

The second area of improvement is installation: these suites were easy and quick to install, making the hour-long mud-wrestle with the Nortons of old a distant nightmare. As a result, the old guys have had little choice but to improve their manners, as we’ll see in Part 3. Real competition can produce real miracles.

Choices

Price is a factor I haven’t considered due to the huge variations in list and street price, promotional offers, country specific deals and the time of year. Support is another factor I’ve ignored because, years ago, Symantec’s cynical approach to support forced me to become self-reliant. It’s best to find a product that doesn’t cause problems in the first place, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.

F-Secure follows a flawed paradigm but implements it well, largely hiding the underlying complexity form users. On a PC that is only just adequate for running Vista with all the bells and whistles turned on, the performance impact of F-Secure was noticeable. On a more beefy machine, it may not be.

The intermittent performance issues I had with Kaspersky may be down to the Vista version, or to my particular set-up. I saw no hint of similar issues on web forums or user reviews – they tended to be much more black and white. I had no dramas of the black kind and I liked the suite on the whole, even if the many ropes and levers behind the scenes will appeal to power users more than simple ones like me.

Bitdefender has all the right ingredients but, like a beef casserole, they need time to combine or more herbs to boost the flavour. The niggles I had with the Avira licence code and the sometimes tedious updates are minor. Apart from these niggles, Avira was easy to live with and didn’t slow my laptop down.

AVIRA Premium Security is my pick of this bunch, together with ESET Smart Security. ESS is dead easy to install in minutes, slipping over your PC like a velvet glove over a smooth hand. ESS has no impact on PC performance and operates in almost total silence, and updates are so fast that you’ll miss them if you sneeze.

The clumsy NOD32 interface of old has given way to a smart new one, and the whole suite feels integrated. Parental control and a few other frills are missing, and the new firewall and spam filter are yet to prove themselves. No doubt the usual reviewers will put their blowtorches on the armour of ESS in the near future.

Part 3 - All-in-one security and housekeeping suites

Norton 360

Three years ago, I swore I’d never let another piece of Symantec code near one of my PCs. Norton security was the jackboot kind that stomps all over the house and issues orders all day long. Updates were painful, PC performance was a distant memory, and working online was like queuing for meat at a Moscow butcher’s twenty years ago.

The reviews for Norton’s 2007 products said Symantec had re-written their antivirus software from the ground up. Norton, once the Hummer of AVs, now claimed to be the Toyota Prius - a ballerina-like footprint of 15mb was among the staggering claims. I was curious to see this for myself despite the old scars on my delicate psyche.

Installation

The download was a mere 56mb, two thirds of the last Norton IS I installed. 360 took 15 minutes to install including the prerequisite file scan, a ‘quick’ scan obviously.

360 asked for a reboot, as usual, and then insisted on doing another Live Update. The message that ‘the latest updates will take effect after you restart your PC’ confirmed my suspicions that Norton hadn’t changed it’s bad manners, and every reboot brought up the nag panel reminding me that I was on borrowed time and urging me to buy the product to ensure continued protection.

FUD.

When When the update was done, 360 wanted to run another virus scan. There’s a skip option this time, which I seized on. That defiant act earned me a red cross mark right away.

If I hadn’t skipped it, and if I had 50gb of data on this machine, this install would be taking hours.

Barely 20 minutes have passed but now I discover that Norton has cheated: some of the extras promised in 360 – features like ad-blocking and anti-spam and parental control - require downloading an ‘add-on’ pack. Not a big deal with ADSL2 but I would’ve preferred to see all the cards on the table up front.

Once the add-on pack is installed, we’re at the 30 minute mark and Norton demands yet another reboot - it hasn’t taken long for Norton to reveal his school bully nature. What is the reason for this throwback to the nineties? Do disk drive makers pay Symantec to do this? Nothing wears your hard drives out faster than constant power-downs.

On the positive side, I admit that this installation was a less arduous experience than I’ve had with Norton products of the past, and that uninstalling Norton 360 afterwards was no longer an exercise that resembled pulling teeth with string tied to door handles.

Norton 360 also sports a friendly new face, a big improvement on the ugly jail window that used to grace the front of this house. The brash colours clash with Vista’s delicate shades but you can’t say it’s not clear and simple.

When I opened Internet Explorer, I found a fat green slug attached to the browser window.

I’m not fond of clutter on browsers, so the best I can say for this thing is that it matches the green of McAfee’s more modest Site Advisor. 360 doesn’t do this to other browsers, thank heavens. From all reports, the built-in protection Firefox and Opera offer is superior to Norton’s anyway.

Performance

This is where I found some genuine surprises. Booting up takes only 30 seconds longer than with ESS on board, and performance is a little more tardy but acceptable. The footprint is hard to believe for a full-function suite, ranging somewhere between 15 to 20mb for the 3 services running. I’m beginning to believe that elephants can dance.

Symantec has also put a silencer on the security components of this suite, so you’re no longer besieged by warning messages about absolutely everything that comes in and out across the wire. 360 also seems more tolerant than its older siblings, not objecting to sharing house room with Windows Defender.

The Extras

Here’s where the show begins to fall apart. The tuning tools are the basic disk cleaning tools provided by Windows, and the same goes for the disk defragger. The back-up tools are Norton’s own but fall short of those in Vista: there’s no disk imaging/roll-back feature a la Norton Ghost.

You’re also warned to close all running programs before starting the ‘automatic’ backup run. How many users would remember to do that? The full back-up is slow and clumsy but will burn a DVD. Norton also offers 2gb of free online storage.

These extras look and feel more like afterthoughts and clash with Norton’s claim that ‘the underlying technologies are seamlessly integrated for maximum performance and efficiency.’

The Issues

Norton 360 feels like a suite thrown together in response to the threat posed by Windows Live One-Care. Competent users will be frustrated by the lack of settings the simple interface offers until they delve way behind the scenes, where they’ll find themselves in a snake pit.

This product is promoted as a comprehensive solution that ‘combines Symantec's proven, industry-leading technologies for antivirus, antispyware, firewall, intrusion protection, anti-phishing, backup and tune-up, eliminating the need to purchase and manage multiple products.’

We have another clash here: Norton sells a product called AntiBot, which ‘actively monitors your PC 24x7, provides real-time protection against [bot] attacks and stop bots from hijacking of your PC. It also claims to detect ‘unusual behavior on your PC’, eliminate threats and find ‘malicious software at the deepest levels of your system.’

Is Symantec saying that 360 offers no protection from bots or malicious applications? What other conclusion is possible? And the same applies to NIS, which 360 is built on. Meanwhile, ESET, Kaspersky et al include this level of protection in their suites, no extras needed.

Another thing that’s missing in Norton 360 is a set of tools for wireless home networks or wireless signal encryption as offered by McAfee Total Protection.

Summary

Norton 360 is many degrees short of the full circle. Performance and user interface are much improved, and the whole thing is much easier to live with than Norton products used to be. It’s hard to believe that old bugbears remain, like the need to reboot after updates. That’s guaranteed to sour any user’s experience.

I suspect 360 is exactly what Symantec wanted to have: an answer to Windows Live One-Care, and fast. I have no doubt 360 is competitive with Microsoft’s effort, but that’s like saying your new car is as attractive as a Ford Edsel.

Many users report serious system and compatibility problems with 360, I didn’t have any. As usual with Norton, the product scores 8/10 in the usual places (CNET, for example) while users give it 4/10.

McAfee Total Protection 2008

18 months ago, McAfee Internet Security 2007 managed to make my new Dell laptop perform with all the agility of an aircraft carrier. Reviews of Total Protection 2007 also spoke of a heavy load, so I braced myself. Indeed, my troubles began before I even downloaded the suite: on my first attempt, I was told I wasn’t eligible for a trial.

Finding the right page on McAfee’s website and choosing the right product for trial requires a sharp eye and a clear mind. You must agree to the terms right up front and what comes down the pipe turns out to be a set-up manager who immediately starts installation proceedings and stops as he (correctly) detects that Avira is still running. He says: remove and reboot, I’ll pick up where we left off.

Mac did exactly that and I was impressed. When he was done, he demanded to run a scan – a quick scan that took a few minutes – and then he was ready to go. Without a reboot? Yes. The install took about 20 minutes, most of it spent on the Easter egg hunt around Mac’s website.

Mac’s outfits seems to have come from an undertaker’s wardrobe with their charcoal and deep-purple hues.

No attempt is made to match, let alone integrate with, Vista’s airy theme.

The interface is clean and functional, though, and does a good job disguising thousands of ropes and wires behind the stage, too many to cover in this short romp through the dressing rooms of new malware suites. All the usual actors are here, from antivirus to parental control. There are SystemGuards that ‘employ real-time heuristics prevent unauthorized changes to the system’ and ‘X-ray for Windows’, which detects and removes rootkits. McAfee’s site advisor is also part of the suite.

Then there are toys like Virus Map, which link to interactive visual displays of malware outbreaks occurring in real-time around the world.

Visual Tracer offers another map, this time with a trace to the origin of attacks on your PC (the last hop traceable through McAfee's servers, anyway).

With no markings on the map, it’s not exactly revealing.

For the seriously paranoid, there’s a Traffic Monitor that analyses network traffic in real time and charts the programs using the most bandwidth.

Mac’s Virtual Technician may be more useful in times of trouble. He checks your PC and connects you with Mac support via live chat if he can't fix your problems.

Performance

Mac gives you the choice of disabling any pieces of the suite you don’t need or want, from the firewall to parental control. But even with everything turned on, Mac TP dances like Fred Astaire. Hard to believe, especially after reading reviews of the 2007 version.

Neil Rubenking explains: ‘If they sold security software by the pound, McAfee Total Protection 2008 would be an incredible bargain, because it has tons of features, many of which are functional and useful. And unlike last year's initial release of MTP, McAfee has found a way to keep the suite from sinking your PC under all that weight.’

McAfee claims that the current version has been optimized and uses fewer processes and resources. I counted just 4 processes, and they totalled 20mb of RAM. Start-up was 40 seconds to the login prompt, the same as ESS the record holder, and it was just 15 seconds slower to get the desktop settled down and the updates done.

In normal operation, no performance drag was noticeable. That was more than a surprise – I wouldn’t have thought it possible with a Mac this big.

The Extras

Mac’s cleaner does more than clean up general refuse like temporary files: it can eliminate invalid shortcuts, clean up CHDSK file remnants, clear recently used file lists from various programs and remove old System Restore points. MTP even includes a file shredder and a registry cleaner that removes orphaned entries.

The back-up program informs me that I needed Microsoft’s .Net Framework 1.1 installed for it to work. That’s a downer since I’ve spent enough hours of my life trying and failing to install various versions of .net. The current version of .net Framework is 3.0 and it’s already installed, so I passed on the backup test.

Mac offers many choices from backing up individual files to a full backup. Quick backup copies only the changes from last time, like a differential backup. It’s also possible to recover previous versions of a file, though the process doesn’t look straightforward.

Mac’s EasyNetwork provides a graphical representation of all the computers on the network (at least those PCs with Mac running on them). McAfee Wireless Protection looks useful for home networks but you need to check Mac’s wireless router/AP compatibility list to make sure your router is supported. If it is, most of the security configuration changes can be made through McAfee.

Summary
I must confess that McAfee Total Protection impressed, despite its Goth-metal garb. The Security Center’s interface is simple and provides one-click access to MTP’s many functions. There’s a choice of menus for simple and advanced users who have access to a host of configuration options. Despite MTP’s severe feature overload, performance on Vista was among the best I saw in this survey.

Unlike Norton 360, MTP had an integrated feel and the extras were serious pieces instead of impromptus dashed off to finish a gala performance. Once installed, MTP gave me no problems but once more user reviews range from brilliant to abysmal with the latter striking the dominant chord - the average user score on CNET is 3/10.

More important in this context is McAfee’s core security, which is not among the best available. It’s middle-of-the pack, solid rather than stellar. If you can live with that, and the idea of having everything you need in one suite has strong appeal, MTP 2008 offers much more than Norton 360.

VCOM/Avanquest System Suite 8 Professional

I looked for a third option in the do-everything category. Microsoft Live One-Care came to mind for a moment, but it was a fleeting moment. Maybe MS should’ve stuck to making its operating systems and applications more secure. Both Bitdefender and Avira offer far superior do-everything products, but I’d already tested their security suites.

VCOM has been around for many years making system tools, so System Suite 8 is a nuts & bolts suite with security add-ons rather than a security suite with added nuts & bolts. Sadly, the security pieces haven’t been selected from the Lexus parts bin: they are Trend Micro and NetDefense, a firewall I’ve never heard of.

System Suite 8 promises that ‘one-click protection automatically identifies and configures your PC security settings when logged on at home, work, or public networks for optimal protection.’

VCOM claims that its ‘Web Defense technology integrates with major search engines to identify and block malicious web sites before you click, protecting you from hacked pages, phishing and fraud scams. Also, Web-connected programs are safe and Internet data entering your PC is monitored for exploits and other security breaches.’

All I can find to support that claim is Linkscanner, which fights for space in Firefox with McAfee’s Site Advisor. It was interesting to see how often they disagree.

The download is 70mb, not bad for a toolbox that resembles those big steel-plated ones you see on the backs of the large pick-up trucks tradesmen use. The installation begins with a request to turn off Windows Defender and firewall. I’m surprised it doesn’t offer to do that for me but later on it redeems itself by offering to check that all my MS software is up-to-date.

SS8 takes about 20 minutes to install and the gaps in this suite are visible right away as a Trend Micro check box pops up.

Boot-up time is a surprising 45 seconds to the login prompt, despite SS8 using up 70mb of RAM. Performance seems unimpaired.

The good impression doesn’t last long as SS8 makes heavy weather of updates, telling me right up front that I was on the wrong page.

SS8 eventually changes its mind and lets me download updates, but only after throwing a few more panels in my path. If the costume of McAfee’s Total Protection is seriously dull, that of SS8 takes theatre to the other extreme.

There’s a ‘One-click Protect’ button that runs an anti-virus scan/anti-spyware scan, enables automatic e-mail and sets up the Firewall.

I took a shortcut and opted for the Quick Scans instead – one for spyware, one for viruses which includes a boot scan.

The first takes a suspect 20 seconds, and the virus scan is all done in a few minutes. I’m not sure what to make of that.

The Extras

The best goodies of this suite are found lower down in the toolbox, with Recovery Commander the centrepiece. It lets you create a bootable rescue disk for those occasions when your Windows shatter. Recovery Commander can save and restore Windows XP and Vista checkpoints and lets you get to them from a bootable rescue disk, even when Windows won’t boot.

I’ve been in that situation more than once and would’ve given my eye teeth for a lifeline like that. You know the feeling: you’ve been meticulous in setting restore points before doing the house cleaning or installing new software but, when Windows won’t boot, the safe place where they’re kept is locked up like a bank vault and you don’t have a password or key.

The System Health check includes Cleanup (temporary files), Disk Space, JetDefrag, a Registry Cleaner, a file shredder and a SMART DiskChec. A ‘One-click Optimize’ button will do the lot for you, if you prefer. The Diskchec looked useful but told me that the Fujitsu drive in my laptop didn’t support ‘self-test’. Hard to believe.

The Issues

There are enough tools here to refurbish an entire office building but my rummaging through the toolbox is interrupted when I notice that the SS8 icons in the taskbar have disappeared. When I turn the suite back on from the main menu, I find most of the security features disabled, including the firewall. Buttons I click on don’t respond and things get sticky.

A reboot fixes things but the unscripted act is soon repeated. After a few more attempts, I tire of going through the arduous process of placing all the players back on the stage and bringing them back to life. The experience doesn’t imbue me with confidence in a product that has the express purpose of making things work better.

Summary

From the first open curtain, I wasn’t really comfortable with this show: it had some really nifty ideas spoilt by slip-ups in the execution. SS8 has great potential but is in desperate need of a new wardrobe designer and a new choreographer, and the individual actors need to sharpen their skills and learn how to work as a team.

As it is, System Suite 8 will be appreciated only by advanced users for the depth of its tool kit. The security section isn’t up to snuff and throws the whole production out of tune. The feeling that lingers is that this suite tries too hard to deliver too much.

Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Surprises

You would expect long-established security suites to have a solid grip on handling malware by now, so the poor results posted by Trend Micro and CA in AV-Comparative tests surprised me. A search using the product names and ‘av-comparatives’ will turn up single product tests that provide details.

AVG free is one of the most popular products out there, so the poor performance of the commercial version was another surprise, most of all in the pro-active tests run by AV-Comparatives. AVG users would do well to add a second product that offers strong heuristic detection, a HIPS program like Threatfire for example.

Norton and McAfee gave me the biggest surprise with their fresh productions. Gone are the days of lumbering mafia heavies beating up your PC. My first thought was: if it’s that easy to do, why didn’t they do it long ago instead of dishing out stale products year after year like some state-owned factory behind the old iron curtain. I guess the catalyst was serious competition from vendors offering smarter choices.

Compromise versus Purity

If Norton’s transformation is remarkable, some of the old bugbears still dog the new production. McAfee’s is more remarkable for leaving no reminders of its former behaviour – even the adware of old is gone.

That MTP’s security pieces aren’t in the top rank won’t make much difference in real-world use, I suspect. Since the performance hit is so slight, users can easily add a HIPS program to enhance their protection without adding significant overhead.

Of course, products that try to do everything for everybody are compromised by default. Greater rewards await those who’re prepared to put in a little more work and select the best components. Even the products in Part 2 vary in their success at forging a few components into a well-working whole. Most of their spam filters range from average to ordinary. If spam is a big issue, specialist applications like Cloudmark might be a better choice.

Theatre

The hype of the vendors would have us believe that we’re under constant threat from meteor showers of malware. The results of the test labs clearly show that none of the products provide 100% protection. A recent F-secure press release puts it in perspective (not intentionally, I suspect):

‘Despite the importance of behaviour-based protection, a core capability of any antivirus solution is the ability to detect malware that is known and can be identified with traditional signature based virus scanning. A test done by AV-Test.org included over 600,000 malware samples. F-Secure achieved a very high detection rate, and was able to detect 978 samples more than Symantec, 42,226 samples that Trend Micro did not detect, and 64,653 samples more than McAfee. F-Secure also detected 105,391 samples that Microsoft’s solution missed.’

Suddenly, that few per cent difference takes on distinct shape. What F-Secure didn’t mention was that its product still missed a bunch of malware. That’s where the theatre comes in: all these vendors claim to keep us safe, yet none can keep out all of the malware – even that which ‘is known and can be identified with traditional signature-based virus scanning.’

The promised security is an illusion created to make us feel better for a time. The question is: if these suites don’t offer full protection, how come all the PCs connected to the internet aren’t infected or part of a botnet by now? So, are we really exposed to this staggering number of vile creatures? Of course not. There are knowledgeable people who don’t use any ‘anti’ software at all and claim their PCs don’t get infected.

I’m inclined to believe them, and here’s why: I’ve run half a dozen different AVs on my PCs over the years, among them poor performers like Trend Micro and AVG. I’ve never had a single infection, but I do observe a few common sense rules for email and surfing the web - http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/driver_training1.pdf

The threats we face are changing rapidly, from random hits to highly targeted shots, from viruses to phishing and other scams. It pays to follow the rules of common sense, regardless of the protection you have in place. And the more common sense you use, the less you rely on your security software to do the heavy lifting.

TRUE FACTS YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE

2008-03-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

TRUE FACTS YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE
&&alert
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why
A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 600 m.p.h.
All porcupines float in water.
Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed, and continue living.
Coca-cola was originally green
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Hot water is heavier than cold
In 1980, the Yellow Pages accidentally listed a Texas funeral home under frozen foods.
It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it.
It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up.
The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth.
Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then
swallows the stomach back.
Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time
Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of linen.
Mosquitoes have teeth
Most lipstick contains fish scales
Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
Polar bears are left-handed.

well i dunno about u, but i learned something from this :) lol
:D
;)

Linux Desktop – Is it an Option for Normal Users?

2008-02-16T01:39:00.000-08:00

Linux Desktop – Is it an Option for Normal Users?
Linux has long held the promise of offering normal users an alternative to Windows.

Rumbles of Mutiny
Murmurs of revolt spread through the taverns in the Kingdom of Windows. The flashy new Vista model King William had promised the people had taken 5 years to put into production, and the price matched its splendour. During those five years, the Apple Opera Company had staged several new productions of impressive polish. The upstarts from Google were giving people free software and email services, and there were rumours that Desktop Linux was mature enough to rival Vista.
In the rugged mountains of Mozilla, far from the Court at Redmond, fiercely independent tribes had held out against King William. Long ago their artisans had sworn an oath to share their ideas and inventions freely. Their creations were built on open platforms like UNIX and Linux, with liberal use of arcane tools. Now there was talk that they’d produced a Linux desktop of great beauty.
The once loyal-to-the-royal media began asking if King William was losing the steely resolve of old. Would people baulk at the outrageous price of Vista and do the unthinkable: rebel and buy a Mac, or replace their Windows with Linux? Was this the autumn of King William’s reign and would Vista become his elaborate tomb? And who would reign after King William? Would it be Big Jobs and Apple or would it be the rebels from Mozilla? Would 2007 be the year of Linux?A journey into the Mountains
One can easily get lost in Mozilla: many paths lead to distant villages, and every village offers its own version of Linux. The language takes some getting used to in these parts: ‘grub’ is nothing to do with food, and ‘root’ is not a vegetable or a crude word for sex (nor is mount’). These words aren’t all that is unfamiliar here: daemons and gnomes live side by side with penguins and drakes, not always in peace.
Hundreds of villages produce hundreds of distros, as they call their Linux platforms, and thousands of artisans have fashioned thousands of software packages, utilities and tools that run on Linux. For the newcomer, it’s like entering a shop in a foreign country where all the wares are labelled in a language he can’t read.
I bought a tourist guide (Get Started with Linux – all you need) to make things easier. The artisans supply their wares on DVDs or as ISO images you can burn to CDs and boot from, and many are ‘Live’ CDs that let you play with them (by rebooting from the CD) before you install these creations.
Windows has an infuriating trait that has made some users leap from high balconies in despair: it will try to boot from anything left in one of your PC’s slots – a CD, a USB stick, an external hard drive and even your shoelace if it’s nearby. Next morning when you boot up, you shudder as a black and white screen declares that all the system-32 files are missing. First you panic, then you try everything you know to coax the thing into life, but Safe Mode refuses to come up and you can’t even get at the dreaded Recovery Console. As you drink your third coffee from trembling hands, it dawns on you that you left the USB stick in the slot at the back of the PC.
Zen and the Art of Motorbike Maintenance
So getting Windows to boot up from a Linux CD is a cinch. My tourist guide said: ‘You’re about an hour away from having a working Linux system’ but, after my first hour with Ubuntu, I was staring at a blank screen and a hung installation. To be on the safe side, I’d chosen my old IBM Thinkpad as the vehicle for this journey, and the climb up this mountain was too much for it. The engine is a meagre 300Mz Pentium with 192mb of RAM but lots of people say that’s enough to run Linux.
Little brother Xubuntu was my next attempt. It took 20 minutes to reach the install option, and another 20 for the map of the world to come up that lets you select your city and time zone. When I clicked on Sydney, I witnessed the strangest thing I’ve ever seen a PC do: continental drift in slow motion. Yes, the continents began to float away, Australia cuddling up to Indonesia and both of them heading for India, with Africa floating across to join them. Xubuntu just drifted away from me.
Zenwalk was said to be an easier road with its lightweight GUI and simple apps. The install was more of a marathon than a walk but we made it to the finish line. It came up in a pretty blue, ready to accept my user name and password. I keyed in ‘root’, but the word in the panel said ‘r66t’. I thought it was my tired eyes but, after more careful attempts, it was clear that too much Zen had scrambled the TP’s keyboard. I felt like a man who’d built a new house and couldn’t get in the front door.
After playing with num locks, caps locks and various key combinations, I struck it lucky: if I held down the ‘Fn’ key while typing, the problem went way but now I was playing piano with one hand tied behind my back. I didn’t persevere for long because Zenwalk performed like an arthritic waiter on tranquilizers. At least I’d managed to get a Linux distro installed, which did a lot for my self-esteem.

Smaller than Lite
Next I tried Slax, a mini version of Slackware. It came up with a promising cloverleaf but, after a few false starts, it went all droopy and left me staring at a blank screen.
Further down the list was Damn Small Linux. True to its name, DSL is a 50mb download that will run from a USB stick. It installed in a relative flash but came up in colours that made my eyes water: lime green on a light yellow screen. I couldn’t read a thing even when using two sets of glasses, trying different angles or turning the room lights off. Somewhere in there was a setting that could make DSL intelligible but it only a Guild Navigator from the planet Dune could’ve found it.
They say Linux can give older PCs a new lease of life but so far, it looked more like the kiss of death. As it happened, there were more villages offering small, light or tiny versions. Puppy Linux sounded cute and supposedly bounced into life straight from the CD, but it refused to wag its tail on the old TP.
My next stop was the village of Beatrix but the people there said the artisan had gone to New Orleans a couple of years back and had not been heard of since Hurricane Katrina. Stories like these are legend in the mountains. They said a man in the next village had built on Beatrix to make BFX, an even better Linux Lite. BFX put up an epic struggle to install itself on the TP: rows and rows of lines kept flashing up the screen and among them I saw the curious message irq15. Nobody cared. Try booting with ‘irqpoll’. I stared at the passing code like an archaeologist trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, until I saw that the lines on the screen were repeating themselves - this puppy was chasing its own tail and would drop dead if I didn’t stop it. Taking Risks
I’d learnt my first lesson about life in the mountains: Don’t believe those guides who tell you that Linux runs okay on old hardware. If I wanted to play with Linux, it was clear that I’d have to install it on my mobile workhorse, a Dell laptop (Intel Core Duo, 1mb RAM). It would have no trouble running the most popular distros - Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS. The only problem was that I’d have to create a partition, which I knew nothing about except that my Windows would shatter if I messed it up.
Some checking up on the Net revealed that Ubuntu could create a partition for you and leave Windows XP intact. More checking revealed that this didn’t always work. The guide I’d hired said: ‘You need to use a program such as Partition Magic to shrink the Windows installation.’
After a full back-up, I installed Paragon Partition Manager from a PC magazine CD. The Help file said: ‘Partition Manager does not provide a function like ‘pick-up free space from existing partition(s) and create one more partition ... [you must] manually define a sequence of resize/move operations on existing partitions in order to free disk space and collect it into a single block of unpartitioned space.’

follow the beat
I was lost in the wilderness with no option but to trust Ubuntu. The 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ CD offered me a quick tour of South Africa’s highveld in its red-brown colours, but I declined and clicked the install icon. The installer took a while to sort himself out and wasn’t very communicative – like a clerk in a bank, he kept disappearing into a backroom for ages, leaving me to stare at the closed door. Eventually Ubuntu came up and started asking the usual questions. I had my guide with me, just in case. I was also sitting on the edge of my seat (is that why it’s called Edgy?), worried about the partitioning ordeal. I relaxed a little when Ubuntu offered to shrink the existing NTFS partition and even let me select the size. Then it created 3 new partitions and asked me if I was happy to go ahead. I double-checked the settings, which were easy to follow, closed my eyes and said YES. It couldn’t have been simpler and was all over in a flash.
After a few more questions about location, local time (the map of the world didn’t dissolve) the installer copied the files across, then asked me to reboot. When I did, the boot screen offered several options with Windows at the bottom. It came up fine with everything in its usual place.

Back to the Stone Age
A second reboot opened the dusty highveld, but the pleasant welcome music struck a sour note: the letters on the screen looked like they’d been borrowed from a Flintstones cartoon, and the pictures were stretched like those on a T-shirt that’s too tight across a beer gut. Ubuntu offered no help, prodding me to download updates instead. How did it expect me to do that without setting up a connection first? I plugged the laptop into the DSL modem and looked for a set-up screen, then watched Ubuntu load down the updates with my mouth wide open.
If only it could’ve taken care of my widescreen just like that. The default GUI is Gnome, and, coming from Windows, I found this little guy hard to follow. They say KDE is more intuitive, so Kubuntu might’ve been a better choice. When I found the Display panel, it was set on 1024 x 768. An arrow down the side hinted at a drop-down list of better choices, except that there weren’t any. Worse, it wasn’t even showing me what it promised, but plain and ugly old 800x600.
The internet revealed that I wasn’t the only dummy looking for a resolution to the widescreen problem. The geeks who inhabit the forums offered fixes involving command line acrobatics and driver hacks that were beyond this fresh-faced penguin. The short version went something like: ‘Use Kernel 2.6.12+ (compile in AGP/DRI support) and Xorg 6.8.99.10+ (use i810 driver, change /etc/X11/xorg.conf to 1280x800).’ My mission was to check if Linux was ready for users of average skill. Ubuntu failed the test, at least on a widescreen laptop. It’s a shame because so much is laid on here: all kinds of applications that would take days to install on Windows. And I’d read that installing more apps was a breeze with Ubuntu, in contrast to other distros. But what was the point? I had to find a distro I could bear to look at.

SUSE with the Open Smile
At the newsagent in the next village, I found a magazine with a Fedora Core 6 DVD and an Open SUSE 10.1 package, complete with manual. As they’re number 2 and 3 on the Linux hit parade, I bought both. A review in the magazine said that Fedora Core 6 was ‘lumbered with’ Pirut and Yum for software management. By now I’d learnt enough of the local dialect to know that this meant arduous treks deep into the mountains to get hold of additional software.
SUSE seemed like a better bet, given that it came with a manual, even if I needed a magnifying glass to read it in the dim light of the midnight oil. The author said it was best to install SUSE on a ‘fresh’ hard disk and added the useful advice that they were quite cheap these days. He skipped over partitioning and dual booting, claiming that these details were beyond the scope of the manual. I flung it on top of the growing pile of CDs which had had failed to work.Since Ubuntu had created more partitions, I thought SUSE would see them, and she did: sd2/dev, sd3/dev and so on. The NTFS tag in sd1/dev gave me a hint where Windows lived, so I clicked on sd3 to install SUSE and took a deep breath.
SUSE asked many more questions than Ubuntu and the install took an hour. After the reboot, a bright blue screen showed that Windows was still an option and I relaxed. Like Ubuntu, SUSE took her time to offer her services, and once again I found myself staring at a scene from the Flintstones. Everything else was where and how it should be, except for Gnome – I’d been so worried about the partitioning that I’d missed the KDE option

.Screens and Screams
SUSE’s list of screen options seemed to cover all the screens made in the last twenty years. Picking a Dell screen with a 1200 x 800 resolution and the Intel G945 driver brought up a panel that said: 1024 x 768 - Accept or Refuse. I refused and went through this loop another dozen times with different choices before I gave up for fear of going mad. We’re not talking about some obscure screen and weird driver here – Intel G915/G945 cards are as common as weeds.
A quick check on the internet revealed that SUSE had a problem with Intel graphics cards as well. The ever-helpful geeks that populate these mountains offered the usual command line hacks but I soon lost interest. Yes, I can see the wise heads shake and hear the voices that say: you can do anything you want with Linux, but you have to learn a little about it first. True, but I’m a typical Windows user - ever tried to read a Microsoft manual or technical bulletin? They’re about as easy to follow as rulings from the taxation office.
I rebooted to check that XP was still intact. It came up with a black and white screen and asked if I’d care to reboot or try Safe Mode. With hands trembling, I restarted the laptop and this time Windows came up, but all the letters were squashed together like sardines in a narrow tin. I delved into Windows to reset the screen resolution. At least I knew my way around XP, so this was easy. It occurred to me that I never thought I’d say anything was easy in Windows.

Migrating to Mozilla Firefox: the Pros, Cons Installation

2008-02-09T00:51:00.000-08:00

A two part guide for Internet Explorer users considering changing to Firefox V2
Part 1 deals with the pro's and con's of using Firefox in preference to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Part 2 is a practical guide to installing Firefox
Part 1: The Pros and Cons
Things change quickly in the world of computers. Just a year ago Microsoft's Internet Explorer seemed to have an unassailable hold on the Internet browser market.
Then all of a sudden through a combination of multiple security vulnerabilities, an aging set of features and the emergence of more modern browsers, Internet Explorer has started to look vulnerable.
So vulnerable in fact that over 100 million users have already switched over to other browsers. And the browser most have switched to is Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox is a fast, lean tabbed browser produced by the Mozilla Corporation. It's the young nimble brother of the original full-featured Mozilla Suite that itself being a spin-off from the ill fated Netscape browser.
The current version of Firefox is 2.0, the first major update since V1.0, the first official release.
Firefox is an impressive product but it's certainly not perfect. A decision to move from Internet Explorer to Firefox is a decision involving trading one set of attributes for another. Each individual will need to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision based on their own needs.
The purpose of this guide is to help you make that choice. And if you decide to go for Firefox I hope to provide you with some tips to make the transition from Internet Explorer as smooth as possible.
Three Good Reasons to Abandon Internet Explorer
1. It's an ongoing security risk.
Even the most one-eyed Microsoft supporter would have to accept that IE has been plagued with security problems.
First, as the world's most popular browser it's a target for hackers. That's because any vulnerability they uncover can be utilized against over 90% of all computers. That's quite a temptation. In fact there have been more attacks against IE than any other Windows component or application and there is no reason to believe this will lesson in the future.
Second it's a security risk because it employs Microsoft's propriety active scripting component called ActiveX. Now ActiveX offers users some real convenience features but those features come at a high cost. Security experts have been concerned about ActiveX right from its introduction and those concerns have proven justified as ActiveX has been at the center of multiple security vulnerabilities including many of the most serious. And it's not only ActiveX, IE also makes use of VBScript and browser helper objects (BHOs) two other convenience technologies that has been heavily exploited by hackers.
The latest version of Internet Explorer, IE7, includes enhancements that address many of these scripting problems but the fundamental problem remains.
Third it's a security risk because IE is too close to the core of the Windows operating system. In fact Microsoft itself argues that it's actually not a browser but part of the operating system. Such closeness is not a good thing; it means that a hacker who breaks into IE may not only have hacked your browser but may also be able to gain access to the operating system itself.
Finally Microsoft's record for responding to reported flaws in IE has been checkered. In several well publicized instances Microsoft have denied the existence of the flaws and instead, gone into "blame the messenger for the message" mode rather than respond. In other cases they have questioned the severity of the claimed flaws. This strange PR-driven stance has meant that patches for a number of critical flaws have been slow to arrive. Indeed even today there are over 20 publicly reported but yet unpatched critical IE flaws. And don't expect things to change much in the future.
Firefox is not exempt from flaws and as it has becomes more popular, these flaws are emerging. Part of this is due to the fact that, unlike IE, the Firefox source code is in the public domain and can be scrutinized for flaws by hackers. However Mozilla has shown itself to be very responsive to fixing reported flaws, often doing so within a few days. This is a far cry from Microsoft's poor track record.
2. If you are not using Windows XP, Microsoft has abandoned you
Internet Explorer 7 is only available to those using Windows XP SP2 or later. Users of earlier versions of Windows have to IE6, a version which has proven highly vulnerable to exploitation. Worse still, the folks at Redmond have announced that any future security enhancements to IE6 offered to Windows XP SP2 users will not necessarily be made available for any Windows operating system prior to XP. The intent is evident; they want everyone to upgrade to Windows XP or the upcoming Vista. The Microsoft announcement will inevitably embolden hackers to target future attacks on IE to versions on non-XP PCs. So if you don't use Windows XP, this alone is sufficient reason to look for an alternative to Internet Explorer.
And it's not only security. IE6 is a dated browser that doesn't even offer tabbed surfing. Yet another reason for users of earlier Windows versions to shift to Firefox.
3. Internet Explorer is less configurable than Firefox
Although IE7 now offers a useful collection of add-ons that allow you to customize your browsing experience the number of such add-ons just can't compare to the 1000+ free extensions available for Firefox.
For example I currently use eleven Firefox extensions, but only one is available for IE7.
To many users, these free extensions are more than niceties; they are integral to the browsing experience. For example the free Adblock extension that eliminates the vast majority of web ads. At the time of writing there is no comparable free extension available for IE7.
IE6 is even less configurable than IE7 and most of the add-ons available are commercial products not free
Three Good Reasons to Stay with Internet Explorer
1. Some web sites won't work properly with Firefox
A number of web sites utilize non-standard, proprietary Microsoft features such as ActiveX in order to provide site navigation and other features. It's probably not a good web design practice but that doesn't stop people doing it.
If you visit one of these non-standard sites using Firefox you will find that some functions won't work or work differently. This could be could be something trivial like the screen colors are wrong or an animation doesn't work or it could be some vitally important function such as a logon box or navigation link.
Luckily there aren't too many such sites and thankfully, their number seems to be reducing. However there are sufficient that you will encounter one sooner or later. If it's an important site such as your internet banking site then you are going to be frustrated.
One site that definitely doesn't work with Firefox is Microsoft Windows Update. Hardly surprising but still an annoyance.
You can of course, simply open IE when you encounter any of these sites. Firefox even has a downloadable extension that allows you to open a page using IE from within Firefox. This significantly reduces the nuisance value but does not of course, solve the basic problem.
If you use Firefox you are going to have to accept that certain sites will be broken and will require you to fire up IE to access them. This is a simple reality.
2. Firefox loads slower than Internet Explorer and takes more memory
Firefox may load web pages faster than IE but the program itself takes longer to load. Much longer, maybe twice as long. Firefox also uses more memory than IE.
IE's better performance here is to some degree an illusion. That's because some of the major components of Internet Explorer are always running on your PC, they are pre-loaded when Windows starts. That means IE has less work to do when it starts so it loads quicker. It also means that IE actually takes up more memory than it appears to.
This Firefox load time inconvenience can be eliminated by always keeping Firefox loaded and simply minimizing it when not in use. In fact it doesn't even need to take up any task bar space as there is a free Firefox extension that allows you to minimize it to the system tray.
Minimizing Firefox also releases some of its memory space so you are killing two birds with the one stone
That said it is a reality that IE loads faster and all potential Firefox users should be aware of this.
3. Firefox has had its own security problems
Firefox may be safer than IE but it has had its own share of security problems. Indeed since V1 was released there have been more than seven new versions containing security enhancements.
This may be so but Mozilla have to be commended how quickly they have released patches for newly discovered flaws, often only a day or two after the flaw was first demonstrated. This is in sharp contrast to Microsoft's tardy response to fixing IE problems.
In fact I have never encountered a hostile website that successfully exploits flaws in the then current version of Firefox. In other words, if you keep your copy of Firefox up to date it is extremely unlikely your browser security will be penetrated. The same cannot be said of Internet Explorer, particularly IE6.
Conclusion
As I said earlier, a decision to move from Internet Explorer to Firefox is a decision involving trading one set of attributes for another. Each individual will need to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision based on their own needs.
If you are not using Windows XP, I think the situation is clear cut. Microsoft has announced that they will not upgrade your Internet Explorer to the latest version 7. Given that, you should move to another browser just on security grounds alone. And if you are going to go to another browser, then THE current browser of choice is Firefox
Windows XP users on the face of it, have a real alternative to Firefox. They can stay with IE by installing XP Service Pack 2 along with IE7.
However experience with IE7 since its release indicates the likelihood of on-going security problems. Yes, Internet Explorer 7 is safer than IE6 but Microsoft's track record for speedily fixing any security problems is poor and bodes ill for the future.
So what do I think?
There is no doubt that Firefox is currently less of a security risk than IE6. In particular it is way less liable to Spyware infection. Every week I get letters from readers who have migrated to Firefox from IE because of recurrent IE6 based spyware infections. Commonly these folks tell me since changing over, they have never had a spyware infection.
This equates with my own experience. Not only have I never had a spyware infection since using Firefox but I have never even seen a circulating spyware exploit for Firefox. By contrast I encounter IE6 based spyware exploits every day.
There is no doubt that IE7 offers better security then IE6 and maybe as good as Firefox 2. However IE7 will remain a target for malware writers simply because of its popularity. That means that there will be more flaws discovered and more exploits released than for Firefox. Combine that with Microsoft's slow response to releasing patches and IE7 security becomes a serious concern.
So to me, security is the bottom line here. Yes, Firefox offers faster browsing. Yes, there are hundreds of free Firefox extensions to customize and optimize your browsing experience. All that is fine and most welcome but the real clincher is that Firefox offers a safer browsing experience and that alone is sufficient warrant to drop IE and make the change right now.

How to Add Notes to Your Files and Folders

2008-02-06T02:35:00.000-08:00

The average PC contains so many files it's pretty easy to forget what a particular file contains or what it does. Most users try and get around this by using descriptive file names. So rather than call a file something like "list.doc" they might call it "thanksgiving acceptances 2007.doc"

In principle this should work pretty well as Windows will accept file names up to 255 characters in length. However in practice, lists of very long file names are difficult to quickly scan and are often truncated by Windows Explorer. And there are other problems. The maximum file name length in the Joliet system commonly used to burn CDs is 128 characters. Worse still, the maximum Joliet path length (including file name) is only 160 characters. This means that many really long file names will be lost when you burn your data to CD.

But there is another way of documenting files using an inbuilt but little-used Windows feature.
This involves the use of the "Comments" field. It's an attribute of all files and folders in Windows just like name, size and date created. Most users don't know about this field as the Comments field is by default not displayed in Windows Explorer in XP.

Turning it on is easy. Open any folder in Windows Explorer and right click on a blank space in the field title bar. That's the grayed out area that says "Name Size Type" etc. When you right click you will see a list of fields displayed with some checked. To display the Comments field, simply check that field. Once checked you now see that field on the right hand side of your Explorer window, though you may have to scroll to the right to see it.

The Comments field will be blank, as we haven't added any comments. I'll get to that later but first we have to tell Windows to now add the Comments field to every window. To do that select Tools / Folder options / View from the window where you just added the Comments field. Then press the "Apply to all folders" button. NOTE: If you have customized folder views for different folders you may want to skip this step as it will give all your folders the same view.

Now here's how you add comments: Just right click a file, select "Properties" then click the "Summary" tab. You can then enter your comments directly in the Comments box at the bottom of the Windows. Whatever you enter will then be displayed in the Comments field in Windows Explorer.

Neat eh? But here are a few additional tips that make the comments field even more useful:

When searching for a particular file you have commented, remember, you can sort on the Comments field in Internet Explorer by clicking on the title, just like any other field. Sorting will group all your annotated files together, which makes them easier to scan when looking for a particular file. Sorted comments are also in alphabetical order, so try to annotate systematically using meaningful keywords at the start of your comments.

Many desktop search programs index the Comments field. That makes searching your comments even easier.

Finally, you can comment your files even more quickly by using the free HobComment Explorer Extension utility that makes the Comments field available directly off the context menu when you right click a file. You can get HobComment from here:

How to Improve Your Security When Using a Public Terminal

2008-02-04T04:15:00.000-08:00

Using a hotel computer, one in an internet cafe or airport is a risky business. Public terminals are fine for general browsing and even (with a few precautions) collecting your email but when it comes to logging in to your bank account or making an online purchase they really should be avoided.

We all know that but life doesn't always allow us to follow the rules; sometimes we simply have to use a public terminal to conduct a confidential transaction

Well I'd dearly like to be able to tell you a way you can use a public terminal with complete safety. I can't. What I can do is show you some ways you can do it with a high degree of security. OK it's not 100% but it's better than no security at all.

There are two main areas of risk when using a public terminal. First someone may be using a session logger to record the flow of data between the PC you are using and the websites you visit. Second there may be a keylogger fitted to the PC that allows someone to capture your keystrokes and sometimes your mouse clicks and screen session as well.

Risk 1: Session Logging

It's dead easy for an ill-intentioned internet cafe operator to record your internet traffic. Indeed I once visited a cafe and noticed the clerk at the front desk was unabashedly scanning traffic from the shop's computers using Ethereal. So believe me, it happens.

It's important that you understand when you a visiting a normal website that most of the information that flows between the PC you are using and the website you are visiting is visible and readable. It's there for anyone to see. "Anyone" includes your ISP or the clerk in the internet cafe.

If you are visiting a secure website (i.e. one whose address begins with https rather than http) your data stream is secure. That's because your data is encrypted end to end i.e. PC to server. Yes, it can still be seen but all that can be seen is a lot of gobbledygook.

If you use Gmail or Yahoo! webmail this is good news as both of these have secure website connections. The last time I used Hotmail it wasn't secure and many other webmail services aren't secure either. It's easy to tell: go to your webmail site and login. If the URL in the browser address bar starts with https it is secure. That means you can read your mail on any public terminal and no one can read your mail by intercepting the traffic between the PC you are using and the webmail service.

If your webmail service uses http rather than https then your email can be intercepted and read. If your email only includes things like a get-well message to Aunt Maud then there is no problem but if it contains your social security number, bank account and other personal details then you should start worrying.

Almost all online banking sites and e-commerce sites use https. That's comforting as it means no one can read your confidential data flowing between the computer you are using and the remote server. Sure they can see the data flow but they can't decrypt it.

Defensive counter-measures against session logging

There are however, a number of ways to convert even a standard http into a secure encrypted https connection. Using a virtual private network is one way but that's an option more readily available to corporate users than individuals. A simpler solution is to use a secure anonymizing network like the free Tor system.

Although Tor was designed to allow you to surf anonymously it has an attractive side benefit: it creates a secure https connection between your PC and the first Tor server. It's not secure beyond the first Tor server but interception is most unlikely once you get beyond the first server. The most likely location for someone to look at your web traffic is between the PC you are using and the first Tor server.

Setting up Tor is simple if you use a product like the free Firefox based XeroBank browser (formerly TorPark). Just start up XeroBank and the rest pretty well happens automatically. XeroBank is also portable so you can safely browse from a public terminal using a copy of XeroBank installed on your USB flash drive.

Surfing with XeroBank is noticeably slowed by the long chain of Tor servers through which your data passes. However a little extra time is a small price to pay for the additional security and anonymity. Besides if you really need speed you can switch back to normal non-secure browsing easily within XeroBank.

If you use XeroBank you can safely read your email even for non-secure webmail websites like HotMail. Whether the content of your webmail warrants the effort involved only you can decide.

I should note in parting that SSL (and thus https) is not immune to decryption. In particular so called "man in the middle attacks" have proven effective. However this kind of advanced attack is highly unlikely in an internet cafe.

Risk 2: Keyloggers

There is no 100% safe way to enter passwords from a public terminal. That's a fact.

Modern keyloggers can capture not only keyboard strokes but mouse clicks and the Windows Clipboard. They can also take screen shots of what you are doing. Keeping your confidential information from the prying eyes of the best of these sinister products is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible.

So the golden rule is don't ever enter confidential information into a hotel computer, an internet cafe PC or other public terminal.

That's the rule but rules get broken. Sometimes we simply have to use a public terminal. I have and I bet most of my readers have too.

So what can you do to improve your security when entering passwords?

Quite a lot actually. Of the many different options available to improve your password security to me the most attractive is to enter your passwords using a password manager like RoboForm2Go running from your own USB flash drive. It's an option I covered in my May 2007editorial column.

When run from a USB flash drive RoboForm2Go provides excellent security. In fact I've not yet found a keylogger that can capture the information it enters into login boxes and web forms from Portable Firefox. Don't take that to mean RoboForm2Go is 100% safe. It's not; no product is.

One particular area of weakness of RoboForm2Go is the master password you must enter to activate the password manager. If a keylogger captured that and also managed to copy the encrypted RoboForm master password file from your USB drive then you are in deep trouble as they would be able to access all your passwords.

So protecting that password is critical. Some special issues apply to protecting your RoboForm2Go password and they are addressed later in the article. Let's first look at the question of protecting passwords in general.

Defensive counter-measures against keyloggers

(a) Use strong passwords

Make your passwords (or passphrases) long and semi-random. Passwords like "SncnGnls3Fp" are much better than something like "banana". This is not only because long random passwords are more difficult to crack but also because they are more more difficult to unscramble from a keylogger log particularly when used in concert with some of the other techniques mentioned below.

Remembering long semi random passwords is difficult but there are lots of mnemonic systems that can help.

By way of example the password "SncnGnls3Fp" I mentioned above is actually "RoboForm2Go" transformed by a simple formula where the first letter is shifted one forward in the alphabet (R -> S) while the next letter is shifted one back (o -> n). The same alternating pattern continues for the rest of the characters.

There a lot of different techniques for creating and remembering strong passwords and phrases. You can find some in this Microsoft article. Also worth consulting is this Wikipedia article on password strength.

(c) Use password obfuscation

Obfuscation is just a fancy way of saying you can should disguise your password by entering it in more complex way than just typing it in from the keyboard.

Obfuscation works because keyloggers just record a long string of the characters you type. At some point the owner of the keylogger has to scan the string to identify passwords so you want to make this task as hard as possible.These days keyloggers make identifying passwords easier by labeling the name of the window where the keystrokes (and mouse click) were made. Even so, obfuscation can still be very effective

There are many ways of obfuscating input. Here are a few:

(i) Where you have two entry boxes on the screen such as a username and password, alternate entry between the two fields after each character is typed by using using your mouse to move between the entry fields

(ii) Rather than just entering the password from the keyboard cut and paste some of the characters that make up your password from another part of the screen. Ideally this should be from the same window as the one containing the password field but other windows will work fine too.

(iii) Drop and drag and drag some characters rather than enter them from the keyboard

(iv) Enter some character by holding down the Alt key and using the numeric keypad. For example the letter "a' can be entered by ALT 123.

(v) Use an onscreen keyboard to enter some of the characters.

(vi) Enter the last half of your password first followed by the first half. Then drop and drag the second half to the front from inside the password box.

(vi) Insert some random characters

For simplicity lets say your password is abcdefg.

Rather than enter your password as a simple sequence of letters throw in some additional dummy random characters along these lines: aMNbOcZdPQReSfgTUV

Now go back and delete the dummy letters one at a time. Delete some characters using backspace, others using the mouse to highlight the letter(s) and the then hitting the Delete key or using the right click context menu and selecting "delete."

Obfuscation works

By combining the dummy character trick with the various multiple entry techniques you can confuse pretty well any keylogger.

However don't feel you have to use every single obfuscation trick I've mentioned; that's overkill. Indeed you may not be able to use all these techniques as some sites and products limit what you can do do. For example RoboForm2GO disables cut and paste as well as drop and drag when you are entering the master password. It also won't allow you to access (get focus in) any window other than the password box. However you can still enter and delete dummy characters as well as entering characters using the Alt (numeric keyboard) trick and combined with a long random password that's good enough.

It's enough because any hacker reading a log from a keylogger has to read, identify, analyze and re-assemble what's recorded. That's hard work. If you use long random passwords combined with even a few obfuscation techniques then almost certainly you've made the job too hard. Possible yes, but too hard, specially when there is easy picking available elsewhere.

But you can increase your security further. use an on-screen keyboard.

(d) Use an on-screen keyboard (OSK)

An on-screen keyboard (OSK) is, as its name implies, a screen version of a normal keyboard where you "type" characters by clicking with your mouse the appropriate key on the screen. Windows has an OSK built-in that can be accessed from Start / All Programs / Accessories / Accessibility / On Screen Keyboard or alternatively from Windows key + U.

Now many folks think that using an OSK to enter password data is more secure because a keylogger can't capture the keystrokes. Unfortunately this is only partly true.

First some OSKs (including the Windows OSK) simply emulate actual keystrokes and these can be recorded by many keyloggers. Second anyone can see what you are entering with an OSK by simply taking a screen movie or even a rapid series of screen shots. Third by recording mouse click coordinates it may be possible to deduce the characters entered with an OSK. Finally it may be possible to capture the password from the OSK using a clipboard monitor when you copy the OSK entered password into a password form field.

That's the bad news. The good news is there are some OSKs that don't emulate keyboard input. Two of these are free, portable and specifically designed for secure entry. The first is Neo's SafeKeys; the second is Monitor Only Keyboard (MOK)].

SafeKeys has some nifty features such as the ability to start up in a different screen position and with a different size every time you run it. This effectively defeats mouse click loggers. It also allows you to drag and drop the entered password into a web form thus bypassing clipboard loggers.

MOK has its own charms: it disables clipboard logging and has the option of a variable key layout. It doesn't support drag and drop but the copy implementation results in equal security to SafeKeys.

So on balance, there is little between the products; each is a perfectly viable solution. Unfortunately both are still vulnerable to screen capture. However a screen capture program would have to take very frequent snaps or a continuous movie to successfully capture all your virtual keystrokes. That's possible, though the host PC would take a big performance hit in the process.

But there is a simple way of getting around screen capture programs: enter part of your password with an OSK and the remainder with the real keyboard. Combine the keyboard entry with a little basic obfuscation and you have a pretty secure solution.

Protecting your RoboForm2Go Master Password

There are some special problems involved in protecting your RoboForm master password when using Roboform2Go from a USB flash drive connected to a public terminal.

Before I address these I want to state that I strongly recommend using RoboForm2Go for safely accessing password-protected websites. It's one of the easiest and most valuable steps you can take to improve your mobile security.

With RoboForm2Go, all of your website passwords are safely encrypted on your USB flash drive, and it's virtually impossible for anyone to decrypt the information from the stored files.

Impossible, that is, unless they have your master password. And there's the catch.

To use RoboForm2Go you must at some point, enter your master password. If attackers use a keylogger to capture that password and also copy your RoboForm2Go password files from your USB drive, then they will have complete access to all your passwords. Hardly a pleasant thought.

So protecting your master password is absolutely critical.

In recognition of this problem, Siber Systems, the developer of RoboForm, has implemented some features that make it more difficult for keyloggers to capture your password.

First, they disable copying text from the master password window. Second, they disable drop and drag. Third, the password entry window contains no text, only graphics. Finally, and most importantly, they include in the password window a link to a special screen based keyboard (MOK) that allows you to enter your master password using mouse clicks.

Frankly, the first three of these measures are of limited benefit. They don't stop most keyloggers and, unfortunately, limit the range of obfuscation measures you can use to disguise your master password. You can't, for example, use the highly effective technique of dropping and dragging part of your entered password from the end of the password to the start. Nor can you cut and paste text from within the master password window or type dummy characters elsewhere in the window.

So these RoboForm security measures are really of limited value. So limited that I've been able to capture the RoboForm master password in every keylogger I've tried.

These particular measures may be limited in value but the MOK built into RoboForm2Go is much more useful. It's quite a secure implementation, unlike the inbuilt Windows MOK.

In total contrast to keyboard entered passwords, I'm yet to find a single keylogger that can pick up passwords entered by the RoboForm MOK.

But there's a small catch. While a keylogger may not be able to grab your password, a screen session recorder can. That's because the RoboForm MOK indicates visually each time you click a "key" with your mouse. This makes your MOK password entries plainly visible on a screen movie.

It would have been much smarter for Siber Systems to have indicated a keyboard press with a sound from the PC speaker and have no screen indication at all. That way a screen session recorder would only show the movements of your mouse over the keyboard without showing what "key" you actually clicked.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the hostile use of screen session recorders is rare compared to the use of keyboard keyloggers. In fact, very rare. That's because taking a live screen movie consumes a lot of computer resources. So much that the computer would be really slowed down and the presence of the keylogger made obvious.

Periodic screen snapshots are, however, reasonably common in keylogging programs. That's because they take far fewer resources than a video, yet still reveal a lot. Fortunately, they are most unlikely to capture enough of your MOK input to reveal your master password. Think about it. Even if the logging program took a screen shot every second it would be virtually impossible to get your entire password. But screen recorders take shots much less frequently than once a second - most operate in minutes rather than seconds.

So on balance using the RoboForm2Go MOK is the way to go. It's not perfectly safe just very safe. It is however, way safer than using keyboard input to enter your master password.

But before you enter anything with a MOK do turn around and make sure nobody is watching over your shoulder. Shoulder surfers just love MOK password entry :>)

How to prevent data loss

2008-02-01T23:51:00.000-08:00

Forget aboutmotherboards,processors,memorymodules and graphics cards
- the most important part of any computer system is the data it holds. Should
data loss occur, it could take ages to re-install those bloated applications, let
alone any vital files and documents. But time is money, and in today’s business
environment the information and data a company stores is often the basis of its
competitive advantage. With the temporary loss of such data, a company can
quickly lose its cutting edge. To lose it permanently will almost certainly bring
about severe disruption; so much disruption that many companies will never
recover from such a loss.
While disk drives are more reliable than they have ever been, disk failure is not
the only reason for misfortune to strike. Apart from fire, flood, and other “acts of
God”, the system administrator has to look out for a multitude of potentially
disastrous possibilities, including the loss of data from computer virus, human
error, theft, and deliberate vandalism.

Have A Recovery Plan

How quickly a company gets up and running after such a “disaster” depends
largely on the precautions it has taken beforehand. After all, it is far better to
formulate a recovery plan before the event, rather than later. The type of recovery
plan chosenwill depend not only on the level of failure or downtime the company
is prepared to accept, but on howmuchmoney it is willing to spend on a recovery
strategy.A real-time fault-tolerant system - preferably achieved by remote server
clustering - should ensure continued operation after failure occurs. If a server
were to go down, a real-time fault-tolerant systemwould automatically switch to
another server or system. No data would be lost, and the least amount of
disruption would occur.
But real-time fault tolerance is not cheap, and neither is it always perfect. Typically,
when a file is deleted froma real-timefault-tolerant server, the server cluster
also deletes the file. Recovery, therefore, is hardly “real-time” because it usually
takes several minutes to restore the file from its backup set. Moreover, the file
may not be identical to the lost file; it could be hours, or perhaps even days old.
A short-time fault-tolerance strategy is a far cheaper alternative. This type of
strategy is best for businesses that can survive a downtime of around two or three
hourswithout grinding to a halt. During downtime all company files and records
are handled manually or moved to another server or workstation until the
problem is fixed.

Protection

At least Windows NT offers its own degree of fault tolerance. Some of these
protective features work transparently, while others, like the Emergency Repair
Disk and Last Known Good configuration utilities, are designed to get the system
up and running again with the minimum of downtime. The Emergency Repair
Disk is basically an NT-formatted floppy containing the files found in the %SYSTEMROOT%\
REPAIR folder. Although the first disk will have been created
during the initial NT installation, it can be updated thereafter using the RDISK
utility from the command prompt. It is important to note, however, that for
reasons of size - this could be several megabytes on certain systems - the RDISK
utility does not update the SAM and SECURITY hives. Employing RDISK with

Data loss can be
devastating to any
business, but recovery
is much easier if a
contingency plan is
formulated before the
event, rather than after.
www.pcnetworkadvisor.com

the /S switchwill copy these hives to the repair folder, but they should be backed
up as part of the normal backup procedure as well.
Typically, the Emergency Repair Disk contains enough registry and file setup
information to return the system to a bootable state. However, the disk must be
kept up to date. It should be updated before any major changes are made to the
system, and then updated again after the changes have been made and the system
is fully operational. The Last Known Good feature can also be a quick recovery
tool. It works because most successful NT boots are cloned to the LastKnown-
Good entry in the system registry. Thus, hitting the space bar when NT bootswill
invoke the Last Known Good configuration, effectively ignoring the new driver
or system settings responsible for having caused the problem.
More recovery options can be found in the System Properties Startup/Shutdown
tab, accessed by clicking on the Control Panel system applet. For example, the
system can be set to reboot immediately after a crash and without the need for
anymanual intervention. This is useful should the crash occur at a time when the
server is not being monitored.

RAID

Hard drive integrity is, of course, essential to any system. Hardware RAID in
particular can offer superb protection from disk failure. This is because data is
spread or striped across a set of disks, improving throughput and protecting the
data held on the array against the failure of any individual disk. There are six
different ways to configure an array. Levels 0, 1, 3 and 5 are the most popular,
though each level contains benefits and drawbacks.However, even the bestRAID
is not completely infallible. Two disks could fail together, for instance, or the
controller could develop a fault. Nevertheless, a properly configured RAID
should be considered an invaluable asset, especially for the larger network.

UPS

Data protection hasmany facets, of course, andwhen looking at the larger picture
it is easy to forget the one thing thatmost of us take for granted - the power supply.
Indeed,many experts believe that external power failures and surges account for
up to 40% of all system failures resulting in data loss. The best way of avoiding
the problem is to install an uninterruptible power supply - commonly known as
aUPS. Basically, the average UPS is a box containing lead-acid batteries, complete
with an inverter to convert direct current from the batteries into an alternating
current.
The most basic UPS will protect a system from any sudden and unpredictable
power surges. More expensive units are designed to cope with a total blackout.
In such cases, a good UPS will keep a system up and running long enough to
administer orderly shutdown procedures. For networks that need to be up every
minute of every single day, even more powerful UPS units are available. Typically,
these UPS units will run for several hours, long enough to give an emergency
generator time to kick in.

Backup Strategy

As always, a solid backup strategy is vital to any recovery plan and, for sheer
convenience, tape is still hard to beat. However, because today’s hard disk
capacities are huge it would be extremely time-consuming to perform a full
backup more often than is necessary. Some small businesses, for instance, may
require a full backup only once a week, with differential or incremental backups
making do in between.
A differential backup copies files that have changed since the last full backup.
Although this type of backup is not as time-consuming as creating a full backup,
both the full and differential backup tapes are required to fully restore a system.
Incremental backups are quicker still, since they contain only the files that have
changed since the last backup of any description. When it comes to the restore
process, however, incremental backups are not quite so convenient because
several backup tapes may be needed to get the system back to normal.
Themost popular backup strategy is based on a three-generation system,with 21
tapes used to back up data for 12 months. This strategy is commonly known a
the grandfather, father and son set. Typically, a full backup is taken at the
beginning of each month (grandfather), another full backup at the start of each
week (father), with differential or incremental backups in between (son). By
following this approach it is possible to create day-to-day backups of the current
week,week-to-week backups of the currentmonth, andmonth-to-month backups
of the current year. Backups should always be verified and the restore process
tested frequently.At the end of the year, themonth and year tapes can be archived
before starting afresh with new ones.
At the very least, backups should be stored in a fireproof safe. Even so, this is not
ideal. After all, what good is the latest backup if it cannot be accessed? Typically,
a fire-ravaged building could be so badly damaged that it is off-limits to everyone,
and it could be days or even weeks before access is granted. Hence the best
solution is to keep backup sets safely stored offsite. One way to achieve this is to
back up crucial files across the Internet, and a growing number of providers now
offer this useful alternative. For example, @Backup (www.backup.com) provides
a 30-day free trial and charges a flat US$99 per year for 100 MB of storage.

Disk Imaging

As an extra form of insurance, utilities that transfer the entire contents of a disk -
or specified folders - over to another drive are also worth considering. Power-
Quest’s Drive Image Pro 3.0 (www.powerquest.com), for instance, creates an
exact image of a hard drive or a hard drive partition. This image can then be used
to deploy multiple Windows workstations, upgrade existing workstations, or
back up and restore hard drives. The utility is primarily designed to protect data
from amajor hard disk crash, but since it supports selected file restore, it can also
be used as a belt-and-braces approach to backups. At its highest compression
ratio, Drive Image Pro offers around 50% compression; thismeans that, in theory,
a 22 GB drive that’s three-quarters full could have its entire image saved to an
empty 10 GB drive.

Virus Threats

Thanks to the growth of the Internet and our increased reliance on email, the
threat of losing data fromviral infection isnowgreater than it has ever been. There
are, of course, many different types of virus, but it is the relatively recent threat
of the macro virus, sent as an attachment to email, which is presently causing
Issue 126:January 2001 File: P1528.3
Page 19 Problem Solving:Software
Prevention Is Best
Today’s hard disks should provide many years of trouble-free service. They
rarely fail, butwhen they do the results can be catastrophic. Therefore it pays
to be aware of potential problems before they become a real threat.
l Back up data regularly. Store backup sets in a fireproof safe, and off-site
wherever possible.
l Use anti-virus software and maintain regular updates.
l To help safeguard against boot sector infections, disable the “boot from
floppy” option in the system BIOS.
l Store important files in a single location such as the My Documents folder.
Then use subfolders to help organise data by project or category. Old data
can be moved across to a specially created Archives folder.
l NT users should maintain an up-to-date Emergency Repair Disk.
l Format newNT volumes asNTFS. The NTFS format includes transactionlogging
capabilities to help prevent data errors.
l Train users to report any unusual noises immediately. Tapping, clicking
or humming sounds are early signs of disk or controller failure.
l Avoid excessive heat. The latest hard drives spin almost twice as fast as
their older counterparts, so make sure the system fan is up to the task.
Consider fitting an additional fan.
l Store an emergency installation of the OS on a different drive.
l For optimal server setup, use mirrored boot drives with all data maintained
on a hardware RAID5 system. Depending on the nature of the data
involved, consider RAID 5+0 for increased speed.
“Many experts
believe that external
power failures and
surges account for up
to 40% of all system
failures resulting in
data loss. The best
way of avoiding the
problem is to install
an uninterruptible
power supply.”
PC Network Advisor
www.pcnetworkadvisor.com
How To Prevent Data Loss
most concern. At least most of the latest anti-virus products can examine attachments
as they sit in the post office. Other applications can work in conjunction
with Internet firewalls to search incoming mail for viruses. Alternatively, configuring
the system to save all attachments to a “safe haven” can easily solve the
problem. This could be to another drive, for instance, which is set to automatically
scan for viruses every time a file is written to it.
Using anti-virus software is every bit as important as keeping regular backups,
and the anti-virus software must be updated regularly. Meanwhile, the whole
workforce should receive regular anti-virus training and be reminded constantly
of the dangers of virus infection.
Data Recovery Tools
Whatever the cause, it is just as well that data loss is not always on a large scale.
When it comes to the occasional file deleted by accident, there are few utilities as
useful as Executive Software’s Undelete for Windows NT. Available as a free
download (www.execsoft.com), the utility is part of a fully featured Undelete
package that changes the Recycle Bin to a Recover Bin, making it easier to retrieve
files no matter how they have been deleted.
A number of manufacturers provide do-it-yourself solutions in the form of data
recovery software. But utilities such as these should be treated with caution since,
in the wrong hands, they can be responsible for losing data permanently. Not so
Search & Rescue, the enterprise version of PowerQuest’s Lost & Found data
recovery application (www.powerquest.com). PowerQuest claims that as long
as the disk is still spinning, Search & Rescue can locate and recover almost any
file, anywhere on the disk. Even accidentally formatted disksmay be cajoled into
surrendering lost data, though only as long as the data hasn’t been overwritten
first. Importantly, no additional hard disk damage or data loss can occur because
Search & Rescue never writes to the impaired disk. Once Search & Rescue locates
the data, it is left to the user to decide where to transfer and restore the recovered
files to.
Recovery Services
Recovery utilities often offer a quick and cheap solution to data loss problems,
but they are not always the best option. When a company’s very survival is at
stake, the common sense approach is to call in a data recovery service sooner
rather than later. Professional recovery experts can recover data from virtually
every situation imaginable, and without voiding equipment warranties. Indeed,
many of these organisations claim that around 95% of all inaccessible data can be
recovered. Be aware that most companies offering this type of service advise users
against the do-it-yourself approach, claiming that the use of data recovery utilities
may decrease the chances of a successful retrieval. Others, such as Ontrack Data
International (www.ontrack.com), a company with a long and established track
record, actually provide both DIY and remote solutions aswell as in-lab capabilities.
Conclusion
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a single, foolproof way to protect systems
from data loss. But with a strict backup regime in place and a carefully thought
out disaster contingency plan, the threat of losing data permanently can be
reduced to almost zero.
Issue 126:January 2001 File: P1528.4
Page 20 Problem Solving:Software
Further Information
Data recovery information
and services
www.datarecoverygroup.-
com
Data recovery FAQs
www.cbltech.com
Daily backups over the
Internet
www.netstore.net
Crash protection software
and anti-virus products
www.symantec.com
RAID technology information
www.rising-edge.com
RAID 1 IDEdiskmirroring
www.arcoide.com
High-performance UPS
systems
www.opti-ups.com
Copyright ITP, 2000
PCNA
PC Network Advisor
www.pcnetworkadvisor.com
How To Prevent Data Loss
Click here for more free networking guides

How to Move the My Documents Folder

2008-02-01T23:48:00.000-08:00

Moving the "My Documents" folder to another drive or partition is easier than you think

Most folks use the My Documents folder to keep all their personal data. Unfortunately, this folder is by default located on the C: drive, the same drive that contains the Windows operating system.

Storing these two things together on the same drive is not a great idea for several reasons. Here are just two:

First, your personal data is very likely to be growing in size while Windows is not. In this era of multi megapixel digital photos you are in real danger of filling up your C: drive. This progessively degrades Windows performance. Sooner or later you'll fill up the disk and have to make more space by deleting some of your personal files or get into the complex and problem- fraught exercise of increasing the size of your primary disk partition.

Second, it complicates backup. Your personal data is changing all the time while the Windows operating system changes much less frequently. That means your personal data needs to be backed up more frequently than Windows. With both on the same drive you'll end up making very large drive images and having to create them more frequently as well. Similar comments apply to disk defragmentation. Mixing your personal data with Windows increases the need for defragging and results in a slower defrag.

Nope, leaving your My Documents folder on the C: drive is like storing your washing powder with your vegetables. Quite possible, but not a great idea.

Now, many folks have only a single partition of their hard drive; that is, their only hard drive is their C: drive. These folks can't move their My Documents folder. They could of course re-partition their drive but that's a complex issue I'm not going to address here.

If you do have two or more partitions on your hard drive, or if you have more than one hard drive, it's quite easy to move your My Documents folder to another drive or partition.

You will, however, need enough free space on the second drive/partition to accommodate all your documents. To find out, go to My Computer and click on View/Details and make a note of the free space available on each partition or drive. Make sure you don't get confused by your CD drive. You can't move your My Documents folder there!

While still in My Computer, right-click on My Documents and select Properties. After a few seconds you should see the folder size shown. If two figures are shown with one in brackets, note the larger figure. That's the amount of disk space you will need.

Now make a decision which drive you'd like to move the My Documents folder to. Make sure there is enough disk space. Let's say you selected the D: drive.

Click on the Start button and then right-click on My Documents and select Properties. If there's no My Documents in your start menu then right click on the My Documents icon on your desktop instead.

When you've clicked on properties, select "Move" and then navigate to your D: drive. Select the drive letter and then click "Make New Folder." Enter "My Documents" as the folder name and hit Enter and then OK. Windows will then ask you whether you want to move your documents; click Yes.

Moving your documents make take some time. Once moved, though, you can access them normally from the "My Documents" icon on the desktop or elsewhere.

In the process you'll free up a lot of room on your C: drive. Defrag the drive so it can be utilized by Windows in the most effective manner.

For more information you can consult this Microsoft document. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310147

The ideal time to relocate the My Document folder and other system folders is when you have just bought a new PC and have yet to load your data or applications. It's something to bear in mind when you get your next PC

how to create bootable CDs

2008-01-30T00:53:00.000-08:00

There are many applications for
bootable CDs - the most common
being when undertaking
large roll-outs and when using test
rigs,where it is often useful to combine
operating systems with boot and diagnostic
diskettes to automate the process
of setting up machines.
If you need to repeatedly test from
clean installations it can save lots of
time if you image a disk drive and put
the image, along with the imagingsoftware,
on a bootable CD. It can also be
a timesaver to have frequently-used
boot and diagnostic diskettes on CD,
and it’s an easy way to work with PCs
that do not have a floppy disk drive.
To see if a PC supports booting
from a CD, check your BIOS setup
screens. SCSI drives have their own
BIOS on the adapter; IDE drives use
code in the system BIOS.Most modern
SCSI adapters have a BIOS that allows
it, and most motherboards of the last
two years support booting from IDE
CDdrives. If you are able to change the
boot options, and it lists “CD-ROM”,
your system supports booting from a
CD. If you have a 1995 or 1996motherboard
or SCSI cardthat doesnot support
it, it’s probably worth contacting
the manufacturer - many have BIOS
upgrades available.
Technical Details
When a bootable CD is created, a
“boot record” is put at the very beginning
of the CD, just as it is with a
bootable floppy or hard disk. This record
specifies whether the CD is to
emulate a floppy or hard disk drive,
and contains a pointer to the location
of the actual boot image file.
The El Torito specification, created
by IBM and Phoenix Technologies,
was designed to be completely compatiblewith
the ISO 9660CDstandard.
It adds to the ISO 9660 specification by
requiring a boot record at sector 11 of
the last session on the CD. The boot
record contains an absolute sector
number that points to the “boot catalog”.
There’s no restriction on the location
of the boot catalog.
The catalog contains a list of entries
describing all the “boot images” present
on the CD. Again, there’s no restriction
on where the boot images can
be on theCD. There can be any number
of them, of three different types:
l “Bootable emulation” causes the
image to be mapped to drive A or
C, as a conventional bootable storage
device.
l “Non-bootable emulation” maps
the image as a conventional storage
device, and allocates the last drive
letter to it.
l “No emulation” is a special mode
which loads the image intomemory
and executes it - extremely useful
when developing copy protection
or “smart” CDs designed for a variety
of disparate systems. For example,
the “no emulation” mode is
used in the Windows NT operating
system CDs.
There ismuchscope for systemvendors
to create multi-image CDs where
the boot image is selected dynamically
by the system BIOS, but this requires a
lot of manual assembling and editing,
and is beyond the range of this article.
Although it is relatively easy to manually
assemble the boot catalog, most
BIOSes do not allow selection of the
image and you will have to write a
small amount of low-level systemcode
to do it.
CDs can be set to boot as drive A or
C. The fact that they are a late addition
to the PCmakes them subject to certain
other restrictions. To boot as drive A,
the boot image must be made in the
same format as a 1.2MB, 1.4MB or 2.88
MB floppy disk. The first floppy disk
drive, if present, will become the B
drive. If the system has a second
floppy disk drive, it will not be accessible.
If theCDis set to boot as theCdrive,
it replaces the normal hard disk drive
C, and has no size limit other than that
of the CD itself. However, the source
drive image must have only one partition.
This partition must be both the
first entry in the partition table and a
standard DOS partition.
Creating The Image
Most currentCDRpublishing packages
are capable of reading a floppy
disk and creating a boot image from it.
With the appropriate menu choices
made, they will automatically “inject”
it into the CDimage.With thismethod
it is extremely easy tomake a bootable
CD. Some of the more advanced packages
like Nero can create a bootable
CD from any disk image, and allow
fine-tuning of parameters such as the
emulation type and startup message.
The basic process for making a bootable
CD from a floppy disk is as follows:
1 Create a bootable floppy disk that
has all required driver and startup
Update 139 (June 2000) Page 3 File: T1214.1
Bootable CDs are an invaluable aid when dealing with large roll-outs and test rigs, and
improvements in CD writing software have made the process of creating them far simpler.
By Matt Jones
How To Create
Bootable CDs
PC Support Advisor
www.itp-journals.com
Tutorial:Operating Systems
software on it. You will need a CD
driver in order to use the CD in a
conventional manner once the system
has finished booting. It is wise
to use a generic CD driver if you
plan on using it in a few different
systems.
2 Make sure that any path names in
the config.sys andautoexec.bat files
do not specify drive letters.
3 Make sure your boot process does
not attempt to write to the disk. Set
the read-only flag on all files and
write-protect the disk if possible. If
your system tries towrite to the CD
on boot-up, it will crash.
4 Test this disk thoroughly in whatever
PC environments you wish to
use it.
5 Once you are happy with the bootable
disk, create the CD with your
CDR publishing package. Selecting
the “bootable” option will usually
prompt for the floppy disk. Put any
other data onto the CD in the same
session.
Larger Images
If you wish to create a larger, harddisk
type image, there are a few more
things to do. You will need to choose
and size your source image hard disk
carefully. A program such as Power-
Quest’s Partition Magic is very handy
for tasks like this.
Create and test your image in the
same manner as the floppy image procedure
detailed above. When you are
happywith it, use a program likeNorton’s
DiskEdit or PowerQuest’sDrive-
Image to read the drive and create an
image of it in a single file.At this point,
if your CDR publishing software supports
disk file images, you can simply
select the appropriate file and it will
automatically create the correct boot
records.
If your software does not support
hard disk images, it is still possible to
create them if you are willing to delve
into image files and boot records with
a hex editor. This is not as difficult as
it sounds, and Phoenix Technologies
have an excellent guide on how to do
it on theirWeb site at www.ptltd.com.
It should be noted, however, that in
most cases the floppy disk image
method is sufficient because drivers
can be loaded that allowthe rest of the
CD to be mounted in the DOS session.
Tips
l A rewriteable CDR drive is an extremely
useful tool when experimenting
with bootable CDs.
Although your test CDRW may be
unusable in some standard CD
drives, it can be used on themastering
systemif the CDRWdrive is set
as the primary CD, and this is
enough for general test purposes. If
you are planning on making a variety
of bootable CDs, or just experimenting,
CDRW has the obvious
advantage of media cost. If you
don’t have a CDRW, any failed experiments
can be used as multi-session
backups.
l When making hard disk image
CDs, an old hard disk drive around
650MB in sizemakes a useful addition
to your mastering system. As
hard disk images have certain partitioning
requirements, detailed
above, it’s much easier to have a
whole disk to use for your layout if
you are doing this type of work.
l UnderWindows NT, you will need
to have administrative rights if you
are creating hard disk images (this
requires access to all disk sectors).
l It is possible that you will encounter
older CDs that start to boot, fail
immediately and hang your system.
This is because there was no
initial standard for the first few sectors
of CDs and, although unlikely,
somemay contain a correct “validation
entry” without any of the other
required boot files.
CDR Software
Until fairly recently, bootable CDs
had to be made manually with a combination
of low-level tools. Utility programs
such as BOOTISO and
DISKIMG were used to read bootable
disks and write images to disk files.
These disk images were then hex edited
and manually added to the CD
layout.
It has now become much easier,
with many current CDR writer software
packages able to make bootable
CDs from a floppy disk image, a hard
disk or an image file.Notable software
packages are Easy CD Creator, Win-
OnCD, CDRWIN, HyCD and Nero.
The latter is an extremely powerful
tool that offers complete control of the
CD writing process, and can create
bootable CDs for many platforms. It
can also create “oversized” CDswhich
can be used to gain a small amount of
copy protection.
Many of these programs can be
evaluated before purchase, and this is
advisable due to the wide variation in
CDR drivers and hardware.
Copyright ITP, 2000
File: T1214.2 Update 139 (June 2000) Page 4
PCSA
The Author
Matt Jones is a softwaredeveloper
and can be contacted as
matt.jones@itp-journals.com.
Further Reading
El Torito Bootable CDROM Format
Specification.
BIOS INT 13 Specification, including
extensions.
Enhanced Disk Drive Specification.
ATAPI Specification.
ISO 9660 Specification.
PC Support Advisor
www.itp-journals.com
Tutorial:Operating Systems
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Satan, Anti-Christ, Their Numbers 666, 3, 13

2008-01-29T01:01:00.001-08:00

I shall expose satan and the anti-christs numerical marking system. While many are looking for the 666 as a sign of the coming anti-christ or beast, satan has cleverly been hiding the 3, the 13 and the 33 and symbols like the all seeing eye and pyramid on most of the products we purchase. The 3's and 13's are everywhere and can easily be seen by simply turning the package upside down or sideways. Examples: take a close look at a bid beer bottle, you will find a 13 hidden in the B. look at a maller beer bottle, you will find a 6 and a 3 if you turn it sideways. Go to the major sports groups websites and you will find a 3 or 13 cleverly hidden in the Logo's of most teams. Take a look at Mc B's signs, on the newer stores you will see a clean break between the M and the red bar below it, if you turn it to the side you will clearly see a 13, you will also see 3's all over their packages if you turn them sideways. You will also find 666 on their apple pie box if you turn it upside down. AEL's online logo is the pyramid with the all seeing eye, CBX's logo is the all seeing eye. Populator's air filters have a pyramid as part of its logo and can again be seen by turnig the box upside down. there are many other major corporations that use these numbers and symbols as part of their logo's, clearly showing their allegiance and connection to the Anti- Christ, who when he appears will control all buying and selling. There is much much more, but I am trying to keep this post as short as possible. The next time you go shopping, turn the product package sideways or upside down and you will see that the Anti- Christ is cleverly marking all his products before his appearing.

How to Re-organize the Windows Start Menu

2008-01-29T00:55:00.001-08:00

It was a simple technique that entailed the creation of categorized folders in the Toolbar and then moving desktop icons into the appropriate folders.

Using the technique you can dramatically reduce the number of icons on your desktop thus making everything quicker to find.

You can apply a similar technique to the Windows Start Menu.

Many users have very long start menus, often with dozens of items in the "All Programs" listing. Some can be so long they even run off the screen.

This needn't be so; it's reasonably simple to organize the "All Programs" section of the Start Menu into your own category folders. Here's how:

Right-click on the Start Menu then click Explore. This will open Windows Explorer within the start menu folder for the current user. If you then click "Programs" on the left hand pane you should see all the programs for the current user listed in your Start Menu.

These names are, for the most part, in one big list. What we want to do is create some category folders then move individual programs into those folders.

The categories you create are up to you. I created three: security, maintenance and utilities. These are the same categories I use for my Quick Launch Menu. Keeping them the same makes my filing consistent.

To create the folders, right click in the any white space in the right hand Explorer pane and select New/Folder. Name your folder appropriately, for example "Security."

Then just drag and drop the appropriate programs into the folder you have created. In my case I moved NOD32, Ewido, SpySweeper and seven other programs into the "Security" folder.

Repeat this procedure for other category folders you want to create. That completes the job for the Start Menu for the current user.

At this stage you may have noticed that some of the programs listed when you hit "All Programs" from the Windows Start Menu are missing from the start menu folder. That's because these programs have been installed for all users not just the current user.

To locate these programs, navigate using the left hand Windows Explorer pane to the start menu folder listed under "All Users." Repeat the procedure of creating folders and moving programs making sure you create the exact same folder names as you did for the current user start menu folder.

When completed, click the Windows Start Menu button in the lower left hand side of your screen and you will see all your new category folders at the end of the All Programs list. Click any folder and you'll see the programs you moved to each folder.

It's a good idea to move these category folders to the top of your Start Menu. You can do this simply by dragging and dropping the folders from within the "All Programs" listing.

You may also want to change the folder icons to something a bit different to the other folders in your "All Programs" list. You can do this by right-clicking on each category folder and selecting Properties / Customize / Change icon, then selecting your icon and pressing Apply.

In the end you'll end up with a Start Menu "All Programs" listing with far fewer items together with a series of category folders. Finding programs using this system is way quicker than selecting from a long list.

If sorting out your Start Menu this way sounds a little daunting, don't worry; there's a free utility that will do it for you more simply. It's called Tidy Start Menu and you can get it here:

http://www.tidystartmenu.com/index.shtml (0.98MB)

There's a free and a paid version but the free will do the job just fine. The main restriction in the free version is that the categories folders are pre-defined rather than user selectable. You can, however, just access the Start Menu folder using the method above and re-name the categories to whatever you want. But hey, I didn't tell you that did

How to Make Firefox Load Faster

2008-01-29T00:48:00.000-08:00

Firefox may run quickly but it loads slowly; here's how to fix it

Note: This tip is not suitable for inexperienced computer users.

You can slash Firefox's slow load time by compressing the DLLs and executables. There are many choices for compression but I suggest you use UPX which is free, efficient and time proven.

1. Download UPX from http://upx.sourceforge.net/#download

2. Unzip upx.exe into your Firefox installation folder which is normally C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox.

3. Make sure Firefox is not running then shell to a command prompt in the Firefox installation directory.

4. Type in the following command in a single line and hit return:

for %v in (.exe .dll components\.dll plugins\.dll) do upx "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\%v"

5. If on some later occasion you want to unpack the files, just type in the command above but add the decompression switch "-d" after "do upx."

2008-01-24T23:58:00.000-08:00

Awesome! B_O_M_B_A_Y

Bombay has no bombs and is a harbour not a bay.

Churchgate has neither a church nor a gate. it is a railway station.
there is no darkness in Andheri.

lalbaag is neither red nor a garden.

No king ever stayed at Kings Circle .

Nor did Queen Victoria stay at Victoria Terminus.

Nor is there any princess at Princess Street .

Lower Parel is at the same level as Parel

There are no marines or sailors at Marine Lines.

The Mahalaxmi temple is at Haji Ali not at Mahalaxmi.

There are no pigs traded at Dukar bazaar.

Teen bati is a junction of 3 roads, not three lamps.

Trams used to terminate at Kings circle not Dadar* Tram Terminus (Dadar T.T.).

Breach Candy is not a sweetmeat market, but there is a Hospital.

Safed Pool has the dirtiest and blackest water.

cannot buy coal at Kolsa street.

There are no Iron smiths at Lohar chawl.

There are no pot makers at Kumbhar wada.

complex is not an Iron and steel market.
Null bazaar does not sell taps.

You will not find ladyfingers at Bheendi Bazaar.

does not have a black Police station.

Hanging Gardens are not suspended.

Mirchi Gully does not sell chillies.

Figs do not grow in Anjir Wadi.

Sitafals do not grow in Sitafal Wadi,

do not grow at Fanaswadi.

But it is true that you may get fleeced at Chor Bazaar!

AMCHI MUMBAI

A City where everything is possible, especially the impossible

. Where lovers first love and then marry, Where there is place for every Tom, Dick and harry

Where telephone bills make a person ill, Where a person cannot sleep without a pill

Where carbon-dioxide is more than oxygen

Where the road is considered to be a dustbin

Where college canteens are full and classes empty,

Adam teasing is also making an entry,

Where a cycle reaches faster than a car,

Where everyone thinks himself to be a star,

Where sky scrapers overlook the slum,

Where houses collapse as the monsoon comes,

Where people first act and then think,

Where there is more water in the pen than ink,

Where the roads see-saw in monsoon

Where the beggars become rich soon,

Where the roads are levelled when the minister arrives,

Where college admission means hard cash,

Where cement is frequently mixed with ash.

This is Mumbai my dear, But don't fear, just cheer, come to Mumbai every year!

THINGS TO PROVE YOU'RE A BOMBAYITE

. You say "town " and expect everyone to know that this means south of Churchgate.

2 You speak in a dialect of Hindi called 'Bambaiya Hindi', which only Bombayites can understand.

3. Your door has more than three locks.

4. Rs 500 worth of groceries fit in one paper bag.

5. Train timings ( 9.27 , 10.49 etc) are really important events of life.

6. You spend more time each month traveling than you spend at home.

7. You call an 8' x 10' clustered room a Hall.

8. You're paying Rs 10,000 for a 1 room flat, the size of walk-in closet and you think it's a "steal

9. You have the following sets of friend: school friends, college friends, neighborhood friends, office friends and yes, train friends, a species unique only in Bombay.

. Cabbies and bus conductors think you are from Mars if you call the roads by their Indian name, they are more familiar with Warden Road, Peddar ï¿½ Road, Altamount Road .

11. Stock market quotes are the only other thing* besides cricket which you follow passionately.

. The first thing that you read in the Times of India is the " Bombay Times" supplement

13. You take fashion seriously. You're suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.

. Hookers, beggars and the homeless are invisible.

15. You compare Bombay to New York 's Manhattan instead of any other cities of India.

16. The most frequently used part of your car is the horn.

17. You insist on calling CST as VT, and Sahar andSantacruz airports instead of Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport

18. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

19. Your idea of personal space is no one actually standing on your toes.

20. Being truly alone makes you nervous.

21. You love wading through knee deep mucky water in the monsoons, and actually call it ''romantic'.

22. Only in Bombay , you would get Chinese Dosa and Jain Chicken

Salaam Bombay......

How Good are Free Security Programs?-part5

2008-01-24T23:33:00.000-08:00

The fifth part of a multi-part series that examines the effectiveness of free security software.

Part 5: Using Intrusion Detection Software

This editorial is the fifth part in a series looking at the effectiveness of free security software.

In previous parts I've shown how users can build a highly capable set of defenses using a three layered system based on free security software.

Last month I showed that by adding an intrusion detection layer (IDS) to these three other layers you could achieve almost 100% protection. The free IDS products I recommended were PrevX and WinPatrol.

The problem I noted was that an IDS program is only effective if users think about the popup warning messages they receive from IDS products. Simply automatically answering "yes" provides no protection at all.

However, responding correctly to these warning messages is not easy. At times even experienced users may not be sure how to answer.

I wish I could give you specific guidance how to respond in all situations. I can't; there are just too many possibilities.

But don't despair; there are three specific situations where it's very clear how you should respond.

Furthermore, these three situations are often the most dangerous so if you answer correctly here you are going a long way towards keeping malware off your computer.

So what are these situations where it's clear how you should respond?

The first occurs when you've browsed to a web site and a warning message flashes up from your IDS even though you have not clicked any buttons or links at the site.

In this situation always disallow the action; that is, answer "No." No exceptions. Just say "No."

The reason you are getting warning messages from your IDS software is almost certainly because the website is trying to secretly install software on your PC. It's a common trick used by the baddies and one where an IDS product like PrevX or WinPatrol can really help guard your system.

The second case is where you are working away at your computer and you get a warning message that a program is trying to add an entry to the Windows Startup folder or wants to start automatically with Windows.

Again, answer "No" unless you absolutely know the program can be trusted and has a legitimate reason to need to startup with Windows.

Sometimes this kind of message appears when one of the trusted programs on your PC automatically updates itself with the latest version. However, from the IDS message, you should be able to identify the program involved. If you recognize it and it’s one of your normal programs or part of Windows, then it's fine to authorize the change. If you don't recognize the program you must say "No."

The third situation is the cruncher; it's the most common source of malware infection. Handle this right and you chances of becoming infected will be dramatically reduced.

That situation is when you install a software product on your PC.

Whenever you install a program, legitimate or not, your IDS program will throw up warning messages. Sometimes, quite a few messages. That's fine; it means the IDS is doing its job.

The sad fact is that there is no way the average users can work out from these IDS warnings whether the program is clean or riddled with spyware.

Experienced users can make some informed guesses but even they can't be sure.

More importantly, no IDS can protect a user who has his mind set on installing a product he wants. That user will answer "yes" to every warning slashed up by an IDS, no matter how many and how grave.

The sad fact is that the most common source of spyware and other malware infection is from users deliberately installing an infected program.

Put in plain English, they deliberately shoot themselves in the foot.

Ask anyone whose job involves removing spyware and they will confirm that most users get infected by their own intended actions. They download some attractive sounding toolbar, game, web accelerator or whatever from some dodgy website and install it deliberately and with intent.

So folks, in this situation, learn to say "No."

I'm not talking here about answering "No" to a warning from your IDS. I'm talking about saying "No" to downloading software whose legitimacy you can not establish.

Most users have learned not to open email attachments from untrusted sources. Yet many will without thinking download and install highly dubious programs on their PC.

Folks, there are thousand of great programs available to you on the internet for free. These programs are ready available from reputable download sites such as those listed here: http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_shareware_sites.htm

On top of this, there are many newsletters like my own that recommend solid products. There are also many software forums that will give you sound advice.

With this plethora of clean and trustworthy software available there is absolutely no need ever for you to download and install any program whose integrity you can't verify. Just don't do it.

Next time you visit a web site and are offered a free program that purports to make your computer run quicker, your searches faster or whatever, simply refuse the offer. It's unlikely such programs can deliver on the promise but they sure can infect your PC.

Now not all programs offered by web sites are infected. Quite the opposite; most aren't. The point is that most users have no way of knowing which programs are infected.

If you choose to install an infected program on your PC, no IDS system can prevent you. All it can do is warn you and you will probably ignore those warnings because you want the program. That’s human nature.

The problem dear readers, is not with the IDS system, the problem is with we users. As the great philosopher Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy and he is us."

http://www.prevx.com/prevxhome.asp

http://www.winpatrol.com

How Good are Free Security Programs?-part4

2008-01-24T23:30:00.000-08:00

The fourth part of a multi-part series that examines the effectiveness of free security software

Part 4: Adding an Intrusion Detection Layer

In previous articles I showed that by combining the free AVG anti- virus scanner, the free version of Ewido anti-Trojan scanner and the free Microsoft Antispyware scanner, it was possible to achieve a 95% detection rate against a particularly nasty set of 104 assorted malware products that I had downloaded from P2P networks.

This month I'll look at a way of increasing the effectiveness from 95% up toward 100% by adding an additional security layer.

The additional layer I suggest consists of an intrusion detection program. And there are some excellent free programs available.

Intrusion detection programs work differently from anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-trojan programs. All those programs depend on recognizing malware from characteristic fingerprints or signatures as they are called.

Intrusion detection products detect malware products by their behavior rather than by looking for a characteristic signature. Kind of like a detective catching a thief using his modus operandi rather than his fingerprint.

The "behavior" that intrusion detection products monitor typically includes:

* changes to the programs that start with Windows
* the launching of new programs
* the alteration of existing programs including DLLs
* changes to key areas of the Window Registry
* the launching of new processes
* installation of drivers
* termination of key programs, processes and services
* the installation of Browser Helper Objects
* Browser home page changes

If an intrusion detection program discovers another program doing any of these things, it will stop the suspicious program dead in its tracks and flash up a warning asking whether you want to allow the activity. That's quite a comfort.

Unfortunately, not only malware programs engage in this kind of activity; legitimate programs do as well and it's tough for intrusion detections programs to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

To handle this problem, intrusion detection programs throw the problem back to the user. They typically pop up a warning message to the user asking what to do. This is good in that the user becomes aware that something potentially threatening is happening but it puts a load on the user to work out what to do. I'll return to this point later.

There are two outstanding free intrusion detection programs available.

The first is PrevX. This was my 2004 "Freeware Product of the Year." PrevX monitors just about every activity on your PC, including all those in the list above and many more. It's so comprehensive in its coverage that it's hard to see how any malware program could install itself without PrevX warning you first.

PrevX, however, is only available for Windows 2000 and later. The good news is that users of earlier Windows systems also have an excellent choice in WinPatrol. It's only slightly less comprehensive than PrevX in its coverage and is easier to use.

By combining either of these free products with AVG, Ewido and MS Antispyware, you can get close to 100% protection for your computer. All for zip.

There’s no doubt about the effectiveness. In my test batch of malware, both PrevX and WinPatrol caught all the malware products missed by the other security layers. I achieved my goal of 100% protection.

But there's a catch.

Intrusion detection products like PrevX and WinPatrol can only protect you if you know how to accurately interpret the warning messages thrown up by these programs. And interpreting these messages is not easy.

Let's say you are installing a free backup program that you have just downloaded.

When you try to install it, both PrevX and WinPatrol will throw up several warning messages asking your permission to proceed. A typical message might read:

"Program temp211 is trying to add an entry backsched.com to the Windows startup program folder. Approve Y/N?"

But what do you do? Most folks would say "yes", because they are installing the backup program of their own free will and expect the program to make changes to their computer during installation.

The fact is that you don't really know. You are just hoping that backsched.com is something to do with your backup program whereas it could actually be malware.

I know this from direct experience; the example I've just given is not made up, it's real. As it turned out, backsched.com contained a version of ISTbar, a nasty homepage and search hijacker. The distributors of the malware have deliberately named the installation program backsched.com to appear to be a harmless. It's a common trick.

Does this make intrusion detection programs useless. Not at all. It just makes them imperfect, like every other security product.

Are they worthwhile? You bet, just as long as you are prepared to think about each warning message before automatically answering "yes."

In the next issue, I'll show you some simple techniques that you can use to ensure that you give the right answers to those tricky security warning messages.

Meantime, if you are not already using either PrevX or WinPatrol, go try them. Both are excellent products and both are free.

If you are an experienced user running Windows 2K or later and have a modern PC then I recommend PrevX. Other users should try WinPatrol.

Once installed, these products will start issuing quite a few warning messages and these may confuse and annoy some users. Don't worry, it's a small price to pay to have your PC better protected. Besides, in the next issue I'll show you how to make some sense of it all.

http://www.prevx.com/prevxhome.asp

http://www.winpatrol.com