Hi all,

I am working in lab with several windows machines running very expensive lab equipment. The head of the lab has disabled all usb ports in fear of virus transfers.  Consequently getting data off these machines is a pain in the b#*t, because only few of the personal are allowed to transfer data off via FTP transfers. 
Is there a better option to keep these machines "safe without any doubt" (paranoia has to be considered) and still somehow enable users to transfer their data on a USB stick?  Is there a way to create a "sandbox" on these windows machines and allow people to only transfer data out of this sandbox to their USB drives and disable any other transfers?

Thanks a lot in advance,
Lutz

We had several threads here lately dealing in one way or another with the power of Google and the potential misuse of their gigantic data collection.
I just came across a Firefox plugin which promises to provide more anonymity for web searches: GoogleSharing .

GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:

   1. Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login.
   2. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow.
   3. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.

GoogleSharing seems to work fine for me so far, although I got once directed to the Spanish language Google site.  Generally, I am now using Cuil and Duck Duck Go for web searches and Google and Bing only for shopping "advice" - thanks to some recent discussions here.

I just came a cross these two defraggers which seem to have not been mentioned yet in all the defrag discussions here.

-  UltraDefrag is an open source project which claims to provide a comparatively fast defragmentation.  The program has many of the advanced options found in commercial defraggers and also in MyDefrag.   I have not tried the program myself yet.  According to their forum, the next version should have a much faster full hard drive optimization procedure.
http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/overview.html

- Advanced Defrag presents some novelties.  The website claims that it defragments MFT, registry , as well as the regular files all without requiring a re-boot and boot-time defragmentation. I gave it a try and it is doing "something" as advertised.  I do not have the expertise to figure out how successful the defragmentation really is.  The fragmentation scan is extremely fast compared to Perfect Disk or Puran Defrag. The simple defragmentation is also  quite fast, but the full optimization took about 20 hours on a 100 GB harddrive that was only half full and previously defragged with Advanced Defrag.  The background defragmentation option did not slow down my computer at all.  You might want to be careful, as the registry defrag also carries out "registry fixes" without offering a backup or an option to decline the fixes. I have not had any problems due to the about 20 fixes it carried out.  Not very confidence inspiring is the lack of a physical address on the Advanced Defrag website.  The authors English seems to need some polishing; but so does mine.   ;)
http://www.advanceddefrag.com/

Does anybody else have any experience with these tools?