Office Depot has come out with new Product Protection Plans.
While 99.97% couldn't care less, I made a spreadsheet with the relevant data, scaled to fit on a phone.
Because I was bored, and we all know what happens when Jim is bored; spreadsheets.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Kaspersky vs. the FBI - yet completely unrelated to the Cold War
So, the FBI hostage-ware has evolved to cope with Windows Defender Offline. To get around it, I used Kaspersky Rescue Disk, freely available from their website. Notes are transcribed below...
1530; Infected with FBI virus. Began running Windows Defender Offline.
1700; WDO has been rendered ineffective, requiring an update that never happens before scanning. Booting into normal mode, Windows has been completely replaced with the hostage-ware screen.
1730; Burned a copy of Kaspersky Rescue CD, and running scan.
1845; KAV failed, but database hasn't been updated since 2012. Downloading update, and will re-scan in half an hour (it takes a while).
1930; Scanning (yup, the update took 45 minutes), estimated time to complete, an hour. Hopefully, the job will be done before close.
2015; KAV worked, killed off the FBI-hostage-ware. Got into the system and installed/ran Malwarebytes, removed many more infected files. Downloading Spybot portable as machine won’t recognize my flash-drive...Obviously, I don't trust any one form of anti-virus enough to have just that one hatchet in the toolbox, but even though it takes a while to make happen, I'm going to remember Kaspersky (the name, if not the spelling).
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| The directions are pretty simple. |
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| The boot-screen... hit [enter] a few times. |
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Switch to Windows Phone app on Android.
Ran across this on G+ the other day and thought it might be worth looking at...
If you were to migrate from Android to Windows the next time you switch out phones, you might want to take the functionality of the apps you've grown used to, but a direct equal is not available.
The is application looks at your current configuration, tells you how many apps have a Windows version [88% in my case], and offers you the chance to e-mail yourself the findings.
Fire-up your new Windows phone, download the file, and the installation-fest begins.
Sounds great, but there's no way to review what apps are being downloaded before put on you phone, aside for eight screen tiles flipping by in the running of the app.
Typical Microsoft. "You'll like it because we'll tell you to like it."
I should say, you know,nice try, but this is a something I would use if I were really desperate to find something to save myself some time were I forced to move to a Windows phone with a gun to my head, but if this is a selling point... um... NO.
I should say, you know,
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| Click here to try for yourself. |
Monday, April 29, 2013
Living in the Cloud; what NOT to upload!
There are some things that you simply don't want out there.* So, like me, you've taken a look at storing things in the Cloud. For all it's benefits there are a few things that you shouldn't place in on-line storage, no matter what.
In a nutshell, it's all the stuff that you wouldn't want your family or boss to know, and legal/financial data.
Embarrassing stuff. I once saw a show called Coupling. Being British, they could get a bit more past the censors, and they came up with the concept of Porn Buddies between the two lead male characters. "If one of us were to die, the other would run to the other's house, and remove all the porn before his mother could find out." If your porn is stored in the Cloud, you have no Porn Buddies to rely upon.
Financial stuff. The list of organisations that have been hacked with user and password lists over the past five years would consume a ream of paper if we printed them all out. Use a different password with each and every site you use, and save the list in a password-protected spreadsheet. Make copies and save them in an encrypted zip-file, and upload that somewhere, but don't upload the raw data. That's just asking for trouble.
Legal [or less than legal] stuff. The days of Napster are over, and as much as I hate the Old Media Over-Lords, with the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime, they're going to win. Paying an author or artist was always my intention when I bought a book, song, or movie, but the RIAA and MPAA were just such assholes about how they made things happen... So, if you've got things that aren't on the up-and-up, don't store them online.
So, for all this, make back-ups. External hard-drives, flash-drives, DVD's. All the ways you used back-ups are still reverent today as they've always been. There are simply some things you want to hold closer to you.
* I'm not qualified, nor sanctioned by anybody, to give legal advice. This just seems common sense to me.
Embarrassing stuff. I once saw a show called Coupling. Being British, they could get a bit more past the censors, and they came up with the concept of Porn Buddies between the two lead male characters. "If one of us were to die, the other would run to the other's house, and remove all the porn before his mother could find out." If your porn is stored in the Cloud, you have no Porn Buddies to rely upon.
Financial stuff. The list of organisations that have been hacked with user and password lists over the past five years would consume a ream of paper if we printed them all out. Use a different password with each and every site you use, and save the list in a password-protected spreadsheet. Make copies and save them in an encrypted zip-file, and upload that somewhere, but don't upload the raw data. That's just asking for trouble.
Legal [or less than legal] stuff. The days of Napster are over, and as much as I hate the Old Media Over-Lords, with the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime, they're going to win. Paying an author or artist was always my intention when I bought a book, song, or movie, but the RIAA and MPAA were just such assholes about how they made things happen... So, if you've got things that aren't on the up-and-up, don't store them online.
So, for all this, make back-ups. External hard-drives, flash-drives, DVD's. All the ways you used back-ups are still reverent today as they've always been. There are simply some things you want to hold closer to you.
* I'm not qualified, nor sanctioned by anybody, to give legal advice. This just seems common sense to me.
Fix It! from Microsoft.
The other day, I ran into an unusual problem while trying to remove malware from a machine running Vista. Somehow, the nasty programs had managed to disable or kill Windows Updates. Smart, because if you can't apply security patches to obvious and known problems, well now, malware for fun and profit becomes that much more fun and profitable.
I asked my friends on Google+ if they're had any ideas how to fix this, but they're Linux, Android, and ChromeOS people. Without a trace of sarcasm, I'm sure, I was told installation of another - hell, any other, operating system - would fix the problem. Thanks, guys, but not the answer I was looking for, although it occurred to me as well.
Right, so the way you fix Windows once it's been infected is pretty simple in general terms. First, download a malware killer (Malwarebytes, Spybot, Windows Defender Offline, etc.) and run the program, removing infected files as you go. Repeat, two or three times. After that, repair the damage done by the little beasties - usually by dialing it back to an earlier Restore Point. Except, in this case, the malware infected the Restore points as well, so you'd just re-infect the machine if they'd work at all. So, I needed another answer.
Digging through Microsoft Support (on a machine running IE6, mind you) I finally found a utility from Microsoft called FixIt. It's "created by Microsoft Fix it Center Solutions, Fix it Center is free tool for the PC that does just that. Fix It Center finds and fixes many common PC and device problems automatically. It also helps prevent new problems by proactively checking for known issues and installing updates. Fix It Center helps combine the many steps of diagnosing and repairing a problem into an automated tool that does the work for you. But that’s not all. Microsoft Fix It Center makes receiving support easier than ever, with tools that help solve the issues that you have now and prevent other issues."
It didn't fix the problem this time, but it might on another machine, and it'd save me the time and trouble of backing the client's data up, re-installing Windows, applying five years worth of updates, and re-installing all his old programs, half of which are on CD's that can't be found.
Click here for download details.
I asked my friends on Google+ if they're had any ideas how to fix this, but they're Linux, Android, and ChromeOS people. Without a trace of sarcasm, I'm sure, I was told installation of another - hell, any other, operating system - would fix the problem. Thanks, guys, but not the answer I was looking for, although it occurred to me as well.
Right, so the way you fix Windows once it's been infected is pretty simple in general terms. First, download a malware killer (Malwarebytes, Spybot, Windows Defender Offline, etc.) and run the program, removing infected files as you go. Repeat, two or three times. After that, repair the damage done by the little beasties - usually by dialing it back to an earlier Restore Point. Except, in this case, the malware infected the Restore points as well, so you'd just re-infect the machine if they'd work at all. So, I needed another answer.
Digging through Microsoft Support (on a machine running IE6, mind you) I finally found a utility from Microsoft called FixIt. It's "created by Microsoft Fix it Center Solutions, Fix it Center is free tool for the PC that does just that. Fix It Center finds and fixes many common PC and device problems automatically. It also helps prevent new problems by proactively checking for known issues and installing updates. Fix It Center helps combine the many steps of diagnosing and repairing a problem into an automated tool that does the work for you. But that’s not all. Microsoft Fix It Center makes receiving support easier than ever, with tools that help solve the issues that you have now and prevent other issues."
It didn't fix the problem this time, but it might on another machine, and it'd save me the time and trouble of backing the client's data up, re-installing Windows, applying five years worth of updates, and re-installing all his old programs, half of which are on CD's that can't be found.
Click here for download details.
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