Login with username and password (forgot your password?)

I like Opera, but there's some stuff I miss in it that FireFox has - like a better adblock and some few other things. If Opera had a plugin system, I probably wouldn't even look back at the fox.

Opera *is* a lot faster than the fox, both in loading and page rendering. Not as fast as IE, but decent enough. It does have a few places where it renders a bit weird, where both IE and the fox render okayish... can't remember the specific sites, I just remember bumping into a few things here and there thinking "hrm, poxy!".

The few things I don't like about Opera is stuff like alt+d not taking you to the address bar, and that they've built in both email and a torrent client in the browser... really ought to be separate apps.

Well, what OS was this on? This sounds like PRE-IE6SP2 since now IE prompts you before an activex control is installed. I have not heard of anyone having an activex control (spyware loading one) being installed without the user being prompted.

XP SP2 with all recent updates. It would seem there's still ways to trick the activex control mechanism. As much as I like IE's speed and low memory usage, it's just too full of holes to be good for carefree surfing.

I dunno if FireFox is that much more safe, but at least it's not targetted as much as IE... yet. The price to pay is of course bloat, sluggishness, slowness and high memory usage.

My own computer has been struck twice (that I can remember). One time was after letting a friend borrow it for a couple hours; checking hotmail and some forums. I think there must have been some malware in a banner ad. Since my friend hadn't browsed any "questionable" stuff, I only noticed the malware after it had deleted a bunch of mp3 and jpg files. Fortunately, the jpegs had been backed up, and the MP3s could be re-ripped.

The other time was when I mistyped an URL and got to one of those typo domainsquat "search engines" that also popped up a couple of alternate pages. I aborted the stuff very quickly, but not before the site had managed to use some IE holes to automatically install some activex control or whatever... was easy to remove and didn't have time to do any damage, though.

My mum was hit by some stuff recently. She was trying to find some online shop selling massage oil (of the non-naughty kind), but ended up on a pr0n site. Again, buncha popups and auto-install-without-asking. No, she doesn't blindly click "install", coz I told her I would lock her PC for a week if she ever did that.

Hm, I think there's unpatched security holes for IE... so you need to basically disable java and javascript or manage your "secure zones" pretty well. Maxthon (and Avant) do seem to incorporate a bit of extra security, but the thing that made me move to FireFox was that some IE exploit got through Avant, and trojanized my system... that was from a period where I didn't run any AV either >_<

that's the joke isn't it - they are there to sheild the disks, would anyone really think they are defect disks? or are we saying this letter is genuine - oh well, i guess it could be.

Well, if the customer ordered 50 disks and only got 48 good ones + the shieldings...

Heh, that sucks.

I usually get a couple of those blank discs when I order my CD-R's or DVD-R's, but they're in *addition* to the (correct amount of) recordable media, and included to shield the media during transport, I guess.

Maxthon seems pretty nice... I like that there's a plugin SDK. And it's sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much faster than firefox.

But I do miss some firefox plugins in it, and I'm not all that happy about the security holes in IE. So I'll probably switch back to firefox and moan about it's slowness and bloatedness.

Well, if it had been programmed decently, it wouldn't have (as many) holes. Yes, it's obviously the most targetted forum because it's the most widespread, but considering the amount of holes and the severity of them, I wouldn't want to run phpBB. Ever.

While phpbb has had its share of hacks, if you stay on top of the patches, you are fine.

Iirc http://www.asmcommunity.net/ used to run phpBB before it switched to SMF... and considering the amount of times the win32asm community has been hacked before it made the switch, well, I certainly wouldn't recommend the previous board software. As holed as a sieve.

/<-rad!

Yeah, that sounds right to me, mouser... DOS handled "B:" tweakily when you didn't have a second floppy drive. After harddrives appeared, there wasn't much advantage in having two floppy drives.

Nice

Jity2, you might need some command-line argument to your compressor to make it include subfolders.

Anyway, it should be a relatively trivial task to do what ou want; one of the AutoHotKey people could probably do it insanely fast

Well, IMHO it depends on how good you are at separating things. That's pretty hard wrt. Mac vs. Windows, though (and hell, throw in linux and it gets worse), because there's so many emotions and so much zealotry involved.

If somebody could succeed in having being relatively objective and have, say, mostly windows stuff, but a fair mix of OS-X/linux/*bsd ... then the result could actually be pretty interesting articles

Oh well, don't know the Scott guy so I can't tell how he's doing it. Is any of his stuff worth reading?

Sounds like the guy needs a little pat on the back and a candyfloss.

I do not see a category for Registry cleaners/optomizers.

You do not want those, anyway... they have minimal effect when they "work", and when they fail, you can have serious issues. Issues that are bad enough you cant' just restore the backup your cleaner made. Just ask Carol Haynes

That one rocks... already at the shotgun-loading sound from DooM, I was smiling

Heh, pretty cool

why not try 3D Analyser? it allows you to change various graphic-related settings, including forced windowed mode

http://www.tommti-systems...m/main-Dateien/files.html

Interesting - I wonder how many things it works with / breaks on

So, what you want is case-insensitive sorting, aye?

Unfortunately, some games block alt+tab, and other games just crash when you tab back to them.

Adding windowed support to existing games might not be the easiest thing on the world. First you'd have to cope with OpenGL vs. DirectX (probably not DirectDraw vs. Direct3D though). Then, at least for DX, there's the problem that some features only work in fullscreen mode - so if the game does error checking on API calls, it might abort.

Sounds like we should really keep away from those "registry cleanres" 

but I think there's some usefulness in being able to differ between "I wrote a little program" vs. "I wrote a little script"

Where is the difference? And much more importantly: What's the use? (Many songs have been writting about this question, it seems kinda fundamental)

I guess time and effort spent, as well as some brief idea of the use? But of course some people write long scripts, and other people write short programs, and people use X when they should have used Y etc...

*shrug*

[1) Kernel-mode driver code (could also solve the page-to-disk problems)]

Definitely do NOT depend on the on-screen keyboard!

IMHO the way that works best is to type your passphrase out of sequence, using the mouse to reposition the caret. A password like "gromit99wallace32" might end up as a keystream of "tgrallce3mio99wa2". It *IS* annoying to do this though, especially because the password input field is masked...

And it's not foolproof, if the keylogger places some API breakpoints rather than just snooping raw keys, it can easily get the "pieced-together" final passphrase.

There's a couple of solutions that could be applied.

1) Kernel-mode driver code (could also solve the page-to-disk problems)
   Too much work and bother. Requires different drivers for 9x/NT/64bit. Not suitable for use on limited user accounts and usb flash drives.

2) Custom control for keyboard input.
   Requires *some* work and would add a bit of bloat, but is doable. Still requires the "shuffled" way of inputting data, but at least it would overcome the "breakpoint on GetDlgItemText" problem.

3) Some additional "visual clue".
   If you had to, say, pick three colors from a 16-color palette in addition to your passphrase, then a generic keylogger wouldn't give all the data necessary to open the file (unless it also logged client-relative mouse events, *sigh*). A targetted attack would still be possible, though.

has anyone read the original story? i've read other p. k. dick stuff; do android's dream of electric sheep is quite removed from blade runner and should be appreciated as a separate thing altogether i'd say. his short stories, that i read, didn't really live up to my expectations. i've heard that 'a scanner darkly' is meant to be a 'classic' - anyone have any opinions?

Oh!

So THAT'S who the guy is - nope, never read any of his stories, but watched blade runner.