John's Computer Support Web Log

On New Year's Eve this year a flaw in the Microsoft Zune player caused it to crash. It appears to be a time related issue and will cause the units to crash in 4 years time. The "fix" according to Microsoft is to let the battery run totally flat and then charge it up the next day.

Microsoft has released Beta 1 of Windows 7, build 7000 to their beta testers. One of the beta testers leaked theirs to a bittorrent site so the beta release of Microsoft's new operating system is travelling around the world. Microsoft were hoping to "officially" release this version between 5th and 13th January.

Windows 7 Review ITWire covers the pirate release of Windows 7 beta.

Actually, it looks like Microsoft themselves leaked it to the bittorrent site in order to create a scene.
Windows 7 leak

There has been a recent scare in regards to secure websites. It shows the underlying flaw in the logic of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and secure websites. Basically if your website link looks like https:// its secure, http:// its open.

The bulk of the Internet's web pages are open, you don't have to worry about most of those pages, since they aren't using information that needs to be kept secure (like your credit card details) and those that need to be secure generally are (like your bank).

The recent problems came when a hacking group created a rogue certificate (the file that verifies the secure site as genuine) for another site. It could be your bank, so a phishing scam that sends the details to a different website other than your bank will have a secure connection that looks like your bank but isn't.

Secure websites are a misnomer anyway, since only the encrypted part of the website is over the Internet. At your end, you read the website in your browser, and your personal information travels encrypted to the server. Once your information reaches the server, it is processed. What a rogue server does is store your details on their site so that it can be harvested. If the certificate looks genuine, then you are more likely to trust the rogue site.

Nimbuzz connects you with the main Instant Messenger providers (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber and AIM) together with some country specific ones (Gadu-Gadu, Hyves, StudVZ and ShuelerVZ) as well as major social networking sites (FaceBook and MySpace) in one program together with a VoIP program that allows you to connect to a SIP provider (such as sipgate)

They provide 4 main versions: A PC version to run on your desktop or laptop; WebChat to run at an internet cafe; Mobile version to run on an Internet ready mobile phone and as a Widget to put on a website of your choice (be it facebook, ebay, etc) or sent by email.

There is a flaw in the Monday update of Mac OSX 10.5.6 that causes the back light to fail on MacBook Pro laptops. Its not a hardware glitch, and there is a fix available that resolves this as long as you have access to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.

MacBook fix

Alpha software is software that is not for public use, usually implies a program that is still being tested within a company. Alpha software may be stable enough to use, but in most cases its highly unstable or may not work. Seeing alpha software gives you a glimpse of the future.

Beta software has been released to a small group of testers, usually a lot of the bugs have been ironed out or being found by the testers.

Release Candidate (RC) is a step above Beta, where the software has been tested and is in the final stages before release. Some software may have many Release Candidates before the official release takes place. Its more to iron out the cosmetic flaws the testers find.

Source code and Binary are terms that explain what the form your program is available in. Programs are written in a programming language and that is called source code. When this code is compiled it becomes an executable file called binary. Its to do with the fact that the computer thinks in two states, either on or off; 1 or 0; true or false.

Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and Subversion (SVN) are methods of storing source code written by many developers. Developers check in changes to the code and different versions are stored with their changes. A user can check out the code at a later date and have the most recent version. The developers can look back and see what changes had to be made and revert a change if necessary.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small files created by your web browser when a website requests them. A cookie stores information about that website that may be re-used in the future.

Amazon, for instance uses cookies to make sure you have the right basket to take to the checkout, so next time you shop with them, the items remain in the basket.

Some sites use cookies for more malicious uses, like tracking which ad you've seen or clicked on to target that form of advert to you in the future.

Since cookies are only a text file, they can't do any malicious damage on their own. Deleting cookies helps to control the sites you have been on, but don't be surprised if you find yourself logged out of pages.

Cookies don't tend to store your username or password, so there are no security issues around having them on your computer.

Windows has bugs, lots of them all over the place so Microsoft releases bug fixes for those bugs on a regular basis. It is very important to keep up to date, so Microsoft builds collections of bug fixes called Service Packs.

With XP and XP Service Pack 1, a lot of bugs were fixed but a critical flaw was discovered which makes these unsafe to use on the Internet. You will know you have these on boot, they have a green bar that flashes across the screen and the words XP Home edition (or Professional edition) displayed there.

If you are planning to use the Internet and your computer uses an old service pack, contact Microsoft and they will send you a copy of Service Pack 3.

Service Pack 2 fixed a lot of problems with previous versions, introducing a firewall and some notification for antivirus protection. Service Pack 3 is the latest service pack release for XP.

Note that Windows 2000 is obsolete and is inherently unsafe on the Internet because of a bug that Microsoft refused to fix.

Vista has Service Pack 1 so far, though it seems Microsoft wish to drop Vista for the new Windows 7 sometime next year.

Autopatcher is a program to install patches and updates from Microsoft in one go. If you have many computers to bring up to date, or need to reinstall one from the original CD, then you don't want the tedious task of running patch updates and rebooting several times to get those latest patches.

Autopatcher works by grabbing the latest patches from Microsoft and downloading them into a location of your choice. You can burn this to a CD or DVD and you have something to reinstall patches up to present day. Autopatcher understands multiple language versions and has support for .Net; directx and extras that are not normally installed on Windows such as Acrobat reader or Windows Live Messenger.

There are also Office patches and add-ons that never made it to the CD for Office 2002, 2003 and 2007 that you can download with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you wish to learn how to write web pages, build your own website or learn a web programming language, it is always better to learn with a hands on approach. Running your own server gives you the chance to experiment with your designs before committing them to the Internet.

There is a wide variety of tutorials that can be found with a simply google search, or take a course at the college in web design.

XAMPP is a web server that you run from your computer. It includes Apache (the web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (web programming language). Together with an FTP server and email server, so you have a complete package to develop any website you want. There is an add-on package for Perl and one for Tomcat (provides a Java server)

Once installed, you start the parts you wish to use, write the pages you wish to display and you have a fully functional website running from your computer.

I'm surprised Microsoft never developed any software that could properly manage programs that startup when you turn on your computer. In Vista a very basic tool is included with Windows Defender, but as with most Microsoft applications it doesn't work properly.

Startup Control Panel enables control over every program that starts up with Windows. If you don't want iTunes running in the background when you don't need it (for instance), this program will give you the power to do just that.

Startup Control Panel installs itself into the Control Panel on all versions of Windows.

However, with Vista's security method you need to extract it someplace, right click on the program and "Run as Administrator". Once installed, run it and change some settings in HKCU or HKLM and you will see they return straight away. Exit the problem and choose "Run with recommended settings". Next time you run Startup Control Panel, it will have Administrator privileges.

One of the biggest problems with computers are viruses and associate programs, and its become a shifting sea of different names, such as:

• Virus - spreads by infecting files
  
• Trojan - pretends to be a good program
  
• Time bomb - destroys something at a set time
  
• Worm - uses security flaws to spread
  
• Downloader - Downloads and installs unwanted programs
  
• PUP - Potentially unwanted program
  
• Rogue - A fake program to make you spend money on it to resolve a problem
  
• Rootkit - A series of programs that replace the ones supplied by Microsoft that prevent antivirus programs from finding them or updating themselves.
  

These nasties work together these days to prevent you from doing anything useful on your computer. They send out spam; they send out attacks; they trick you into losing your identity and losing your money.

I use and recommend AVG as a daily antivirus/anti spyware solution. Its a free program unless you run a business (you would need to buy a license) but as with any program, its not foolproof.

As with all antivirus programs, the weakness is the user. If you use a buggy web browser (such as Internet Explorer) or frequent bad sites (such as porn sites) you open your computer to repeat infection.

I also recommend a one time program remover called ComboFix that will rid rootkits and other nasties from your computer.

If your antivirus becomes infected, and you run ComboFix, you will need to reinstall the antivirus program afterwards.

One of the problems with computers is security, you have sensitive files that you don't want others to look at or find. They may be material of an adult nature that you don't want your children seeing for instance.

Truecrypt provides a system of encryption either as a single container (called a volume) or for whole drives. You can set up a computer so that if the pass phrase isn't known, the contents is completely unreadable.

By far the easiest is to create a file that is the size of what you are going to store. Truecrypt will then mount it as a drive letter so Windows can access it without problems and you set a secure pass phrase. The phrase is case sensitive, so choose something personal, like the first few words of your favourite childhood song or nursery rhyme will do. Remember what you type, or you will not be able to recover your files later.

You can also create this on a USB memory stick, so you can carry the files around with no problems.

There is also plausible deniability as you can use hidden partitions within the truecrypt file or drive.

However, if you want something smaller to encrypt a few pages of words, such as passwords or the like there is Steganos Locknote. Locknote behaves like Windows notepad which is encrypted with a password. The information is hidden inside the program in such a way that anyone who reads the file will not find your information.

Note that trying to hide files in encrypted locations will not prevent the Police from arresting you if you commit a crime and attempt to hide information from them.

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC.

Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips.

You can also incorporate text into your photo, so you can name people in the photo for further reference or even to prevent people using your photos on the Internet without your permission.

Irfanview is a very fast, small, compact and innovative free graphics viewer and converter. With Irfanview you can:

• Crop an image to a set size
  
• Resize/resample an image
  
• Convert an image into a different format
  
• Apply filters to an image
  
• Create thumbnails of an image
  
• Process a batch of images with the above features
  

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software that is good enough to compete with Adobe PhotoShop. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

On their website are a large collection of user supported plugins that extend the features of the program. It bares no relation to Microsoft Paint but uses Microsoft .Net framework.

TuxPaint is a kids painting program that is so much more powerful than Microsoft Paint. A child of any age can quickly and easily grasp the concepts of using the mouse to draw and paint (my niece is 2 and she uses it) and the adult portion of the program enables you to control where the pictures are saved, whether the child can print or hear the sounds.

The Open Clip Art Library is a repository of freely usable clip art in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format ideal for use in Open Office.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. Inkscape is a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards.

Picture Shark is a branding software that incorporates another image or text into your photo or picture (known in the trade as a watermark). This deters people from stealing it for their own website without your permission.

Ever since Adobe created their Portable Document Format (PDF) as something that can be opened anywhere in the world with their free software, and the flexibility of the format has made it accepted by printers and publishers as their default format for publishing.

Book writers now find they need to submit their proofs to a printer in PDF format because its easier for them and as they don't need to use several packages its cheaper too.

Foxit Reader by Foxit software is a much smaller and faster program for opening and printing PDF files than the standard Adobe reader. Also, since Adobe has extended the features of PDF with support for VRML and others features that most people will never need or understand, they have bloated their program. Foxit reader has none of these features which makes it so much leaner and faster.

Primo PDF is a piece of software that pretends to be a printer. As far as you are concerned, its a printer. Print from any program and it will produce a PDF file of that printed output. You can add protection to your PDF if you fancy stopping people from saving, editing or printing the PDF and you can protect it with a simple password.

Open Officecan export your documents as PDF, so you don't need a separate program to print them.