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It’s 2010, do you know where your balls are?
March 12th, 2010Apparently HP does. In their mice.
Come on people. It’s 2010. Optical mice can be had from Newegg for $4. I can’t believe ball-mice are still being packaged with new machines. And this wasn’t even a cheap piece of crap Acer, this came with a brand new HP Proliant server! Sheesh. Spare no expense with that fancy fuckin technology why don’t yah?
I guess since it’s a server it’ll be remoted in to 99% of the time anyway, but still. Like it would’ve broken HP’s bank to throw an optical mouse in there?
I had forgotten how absolutely frustrating ball mice are with out a perfectly flat surface until now. Thanks HP.
Windows 7 Annoyance: File Properties
March 7th, 2010For the most part Windows 7 is great. There are a few – things – about it that annoy me, and I have found another. This “feature” has popped up a couple times and is very frustrating when it does.
For files created/modified in the last 24 hours, Windows 7 does not display the file time in the File Properties dialog. It just gives a very unspecific “X hours ago”. What the fuck is this shit?
So if I wanted to know the EXACT time this file was created, I can’t see that. Fan-fucking-tastic idea Microsoft. Where do you idiots come up with this shit? Seriously, who ever thought this was a good idea should be punched square in the balls. What good does “5 hours ago” do. Ok, so it was created some time 5 hours ago, giving an hour of buffer time in there. That really doesn’t help me. Continue reading: Windows 7 Annoyance: File Properties »
Java: A Malware Writter’s Dream Come True
March 5th, 2010Not too long ago I wrote about how to Make Firefox More Secure by Disabling Java in it. Since I wrote that article in November, nearly every malware cleanup I have done since then has used Java as it’s injection vector, and that has been quite a lot. This has become a HUGE wide spread security issue for Windows users, and it’s all thanks to Oracle’s Java plugin for web browsers.
Java isn’t supposed to allow apps with out a certificate to execute unless the user gives it permission to. The problem is that there are bugs in the Java plugin that allow malicious apps to still run, regardless of the user clicking allow or block! I don’t know if the latest Java update version has patched these holes or not. Every system I have seen though has been running Java 6, just one of the lower update numbers (they’re on update 18 at the time of this writing). Compounding the issue is that most people never update Java. Heck, I hardly ever used it, so I never updated it either.
The Java plugin is allowing malware writers to infect machines, no matter which web browser or which version of the browser the victim is using. Java is allowing malicious code to run, which in turn infects machines. This needs to be stopped, and the best way to do so is completely remove Java from your computer. I urge everyone to uninstall the Java plugins immediately. If this is not an option for you because you need Java for some poorly coded website, or obscure photo uploader (thanks Facebook), then you should at least be disabling Java in your browser until you come to the page you actually want it to run on.
In my previous article I showed you how to disable it in Firefox 3.5. Well, since then Firefox 3.6 has come out, and it changes how the Java Plugin has to be disabled. Now you have to click Tools -> Addons -> Plugins
Find the “Java(TM) Platform SE x Uxx” (the x’s are version numbers), and click the Disable button on it. There is also a “Java Deployment Toolkit” that you should disable as well.
If you’re using Internet Explorer you should uninstall Java completely. In IE you’re supposed to be able to click Tools -> Internet Options -> Manage Add-ons, then find all of the Java Plug-in’s in there going through the various lists, and disable them, but I have not been able to. Even though I have disabled every single java plugin possible, when I visit a java web site, it still loads up Java. For this reason, I recommend completely removing Java from your computer if you’re in IE user. Or even better yet, use Firefox which actually disables the Java plugin when you click the disable button in it. IE sucks, stop using it.
For Firefox, that’s it. Rest assured you have once again secured your browser. If you visit a site you TRUST explicitly, then you will simply need to revisit the Plugin and click Enable. The change is instantaneous and fortunately doesn’t require a browser restart.
I can already hear you now “Just make sure you’re updated to the latest version”. To that I say NO. Java has proven itself HIGHLY dangerous to a computer’s security. Allowing it to sit there and load, even if it’s the latest version, is ill-advised as any new exploit could be found at any time and allow the malicious code through again.
Just say NO to java!
The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans Losers
March 2nd, 2010
First off, let me say I love The Big Lebowski. I have attended local Lebowski events and had a blast at them. It’s one of those movies that you watch the first time and you’re just confused. You get some of the obvious jokes, but you’re mostly left going wtf was that? Pretty soon you’ll end up watching it again, and then you really start catching the little things. All of the tiny details in the dialog and in the background and you find yourself cracking up through out the whole thing. It’s easily one of my favorite movies.
For this reason I knew I had to rent The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans when I heard about it.
First I’ll get in to ways that it was good: It burnt an hour and 10 minutes up of my borring night.
Next let’s get to ways that it was lame: There is no menu system. You put the disc in and the movie starts playing. Seriously, I can make better DVD’s on my computer with free software. The movie was also not widescreen, parts of it are letter-boxed, parts of it are full screen (4:3). It’s like they couldn’t pick a format. Not a good start already.
They thoroughly interviewed the guy who played Saddam and the guy who played the Corvette owner. The check out girl (on screen for 4 seconds), and her twin sister are in there too. Oh yeah, and Liam (not a single speaking part). Wow, great, you got people that were on screen for a combined total of less then a minute. REALLY? You couldn’t get any of the actual actors in the movie that had real parts?? Well, they DID talk to Jeff Bridges… what looked like outside a night club at 3am for 30 seconds. What was weird though was Jeff Bridges was at a Lebowski event, and they have footge of him there. But they couldn’t sit him down for a real interview? Pretty crappy. Continue reading: The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans Losers »
Firefox 3.6 Breaks Themes and Personas Coexistence
January 22nd, 2010I was excited to see that Firefox 3.6 was released today, so I promptly downloaded and installed it on my Asus Netbook (which I have been loving by the way). Upon restarting Firefox after the upgrade I noticed my Persona was missing. Now would be a good time to explain that I run a theme on my Netbook other then default. The default Firefox theme is generally ok, but on a Netbook it is simply too bloated and chunky. It takes up way too much real estate on a Netbook’s low res screen. To resolve that annoyance I run a theme called Classic Compact. It gives you a good chunk of your screen space back, leaving you more room to view your porn websites.
After loading up 3.6 and seeing my Theme was lacking my Persona (the clean Firefox B), I hopped back over to the Persona website and reapplied it. But at this point something disturbing happened. Firefox switched back over to it’s morbidly obese default theme. I turned Classic Compact back on and applied the Persona again, and again Firefox’s ugly fat theme butted in. After a quick goog, I discovered that this was a common complaint on the Mozilla forums. Evidently in the new version of Firefox, with the Persona integration, they merged Persona’s in to themes. You can no longer have both, as you always could before.
After screaming a few choice words I decided to just downgrade back to 3.5.7 until Firefox fixes this issue or someone else releases an add-on that will fix this bullshit.
It’s pathetic that Mozilla would take a feature that has been working fine for such a long time, integrate it, and completely fuck it up!
I also find it rather pathetic that Mozilla couldn’t scrape together a single fucking Windows 7 feature for Firefox… I would’ve been happy with even some god damn jump lists, but noooo… heaven forbid the Mozilla team actually be on the ball about what it’s users want.
So the lesson here is, if you run a theme and a persona, don’t upgrade to 3.6 quite yet. Wait for a fix to come out, either from Mozilla, or from someone in the community in the form of an add on. And since pictures are always more fun to look at…
Continue reading: Firefox 3.6 Breaks Themes and Personas Coexistence »
TrueCrypt Full System Encryption on a Netbook
January 2nd, 2010For the uninitiated, TrueCrypt is a Free, Open Source, on-the-fly disk encryption software. You can do many things with it, from Encrypting flash drive, to creating Encrypted file containers, to Full System Encryption. I had done all except the latter and I have been wanting to try it out. For various reasons though I had never really bothered with it, until now.
Over the holidays I picked up an Asus EeePC 1005HA Netbook
I have a 14 inch laptop with all the bells and whistles of a normal laptop, but after a while, lugging the beastly heavy thing around got to be quite old, and it got to a point where I just didn’t even bother bringing it with me any more because it was just a hassle. I picked up the Netbook to hopefully remedy this issue. Their small and incredibly light build will hopefully not become such a burden down the road. While you can definitely feel the slowness of the Atom processor, you only really notice it if you’re doing a bunch of stuff at once. If you’re just surfing the net, IM’ing, doing office stuff, you don’t really notice at all.
So now that I have my new little buddy I started thinking about security for it. Since it’s so small and will be going with me every where, it’s also prone to growing a set of legs and walking off. Should this occur, I want all of my personal and work related files stored on it to be completely secure. I have used TrueCrypt for many years so I have come to trust it, and I figured this would be en excellent solution.
Continue reading: TrueCrypt Full System Encryption on a Netbook »
Windows Server Backup Sucks
December 5th, 2009This article is referring specifically to Windows Server Backup 1.0 that comes with Windows Server 2008 R2.
I recently had the pleasure of another horrid Server 2008 product. This time around it’s the built in backup utility causing my head aches.
What’s the problem with it? It’s slow. I don’t mean takes a few extra hours slow… I mean it takes 18 hours slow.
First let me give a quick over view of the equipment being used… as this is definitely NOT a hardware issue. It’s a poorly-written half-assed software issue.
The server is 2U rackmount HP Proliant DL380, running 2 Intel Xeon E5540 CPU’s at 2.53Ghz. Each CPU has 4 cores with hyper-threading, giving it a total of 16 processing cores. It has 24gb of ram (6gb free when in production). For HD’s it is running 8 300GB 10,000 RPM SAS hot-swappable drives in a RAID 10 configuration. This server is no slouch. The server’s sole purpose is a Hyper-V server. It runs 4 virtual machines, all Server 2003 machines with 4 gb of ram each. In total, the virtual server has 746gb of data that needs backed up.
The server is connected via gigabit ethernet to a switch. The switch is connected via fiber to another switch, where lives our backup server that is also connected at gigabit and has 2tb of storage space for the server backup. Using straight file copying over network shares I have verified full gigabit transfer speeds.
It all sounds good right? Well, it actually all is pretty nice… until you throw Windows Server Backup in to the mix. What a piece of shit program this is. I’ll save you the hours of configuration it took to get it to play nice in setting the backup to go to the network share and to play nice with the Hyper-V virtual machines. Mind you this is a production server, so shutting down the 2003 servers for a couple hours isn’t an option. Luckily volume shadow copy services comes to the rescue here, but again, I’ll spare you the explanation on that as this isn’t the point.
Continue reading: Windows Server Backup Sucks »
I still like Avira
November 14th, 2009I also mentioned I didn’t blame Avira because I felt that it was a new strain, and it looks like I was right.
Yesterday when I scanned the infected file it wasn’t reporting any issues.
Today I noticed a little update notice from Avira so for the heck of it I scanned the infected file again (kept it around to test with), and bam, detected!
So for the heck of it I popped it through my trusty online scanner, VirusTotal which will scan any file you upload against 41 antivirus engines.
The other day I got:
File iaStor.sys received on 2009.11.12 18:25:30 (UTC)
Current status: finished
Result: 1/41 (2.44%)
Reanalysing the file today I get:
File iaStor.sys received on 2009.11.15 00:09:41 (UTC)
Current status: finishedResult: 11/41 (26.83%)
