Topics

1

General Software Discussion / WinPatrol appears dead

« on: May 18, 2019, 01:07 PM »

Back in the days of Windows XP I found WinPatrol to be a unique and effective security tool. Until recently it still had a place in my Windows 10 PC but while it appeared to be running I started getting alerts of programs starting up from Windows Defender and Malwarebytes Pro whereas WinPatrol stayed silent.

It was here on Donationcoder I learned of the two other WinPatrol products, WAR and WinPrivacy. I had them installed on my PC and laptop but they would use up all of the laptop memory. So I would open the dashboard and disable them only to have them enable themselves within about 15 minutes. Weird. I emailed WinPatrol/Brett Lowery asking how to fix this issue and didn't hear anything back.

So I did some checking. First, I visited the website only to get the warning it was unsafe. Meh, probably an expired security certificate. That happens. But the three products, WinPatrol, WAR and WinPrivacy, haven't had an update since 2017. And this is security software! Some internet searches produced unfortunate results. The consensus appears to be that after Bill Pytlovany sold it, the WinPatrol saw little to no continued development making it mostly ineffective compared to other options, and WAR and WinPrivacy simply flag everything and don't serve much purpose. But Lowery appears to be actively selling all three products, perhaps relying on the reputation of the old WinPatrol to generate sales.

Another solid, once effective product (WinPatrol - the others were always buggy on my computers) appears to have withered and died. Too bad.

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Living Room / Ahem . . . has your antivirus program been compromised by GCHQ and NSA?

« on: June 24, 2015, 10:22 PM »

I don't think this has been posted here. The Intercept reported Monday: "The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden." There is quite a list of potentially targeted antivirus programs. The article mentions how Kaspersky Lab was singled out by GCHQ and makes the ironic observation that Kaspersky has been a thorn in GCHQ and NSA's side by uncovering superviruses that appear to have been created by those agencies. It is a good read.

https://firstlook.or...-targeted-kaspersky/

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General Software Discussion / raffle/random choice software

« on: June 08, 2015, 10:11 PM »

I thought I read about something like this here on DC before but the search engine is failing me. I'm working with a non-profit foundation that wants to award nominal amounts of cash to charitable groups in the USA on a random selection basis. These are small groups, often church ministries, providing localized services like special needs tutoring, food banks, cholesterol screening, etc. The non-profit doesn't want to use the words "chance" or "lottery" in the application notices, and it most definitely wants to use a software program to ensure the selection process is fair. It expects a hundred or more applications for about 20 awards. I've done web searches, but as always, DC will give me a better start than guessing what software works and what doesn't. Any input or advice?

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Living Room / Giving personal identifying info . . . to credit protection companies?

« on: August 19, 2014, 09:26 PM »

My credit union (for those of you not in the USA, a credit union is similar to a federally chartered bank but with slightly different rules) offers a free service that looks good in that it will check my credit score daily for potential fraudulent activity, and another free service will check daily for any of a host of interests running my name/address/credit (includes utility companies, government agencies, banking and credit companies, etc.). But both of these services are offered by 3rd parties, and I have to basically give them the exact info that I'm trying to protect - full name, DOB, SSN, bank and credit card account numbers. I get that they need to know who I am to run these checks, but I'm hesitant for obvious reasons. Do you have experience with any similar services? Any thoughts about giving "it" up in order to protect "it"?

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Living Room / Have you encountered webcam spying?

« on: March 29, 2013, 10:40 AM »

I installed anti-keylogger software and it has alerted twice in the past 24 hours that 2 different websites were trying to turn on my webcam. Unfortunately, both of these were reputable sites, one of which I visit for my work and have an account with for product distribution. Is this real? Or a false alert? If true, this is pretty invasive.

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Post New Requests Here / IDEA: super word counter

« on: February 17, 2013, 10:17 AM »

I write for a living and when you get 10,000 words into a subject it is pretty easy for things to start repeating (phrases and sentence starts), and when you are trying to write convincingly, loaded words and phrases tend to repeat (“clearly” “without question”).  These things lower the quality of the writing and turn off readers – even subconsciously, we don’t like bad writing.

How about a super word counter, that in addition to counting the standard pages/words/paragraphs/characters/lines, will also generate lists for repeated words, repeated phrases, adverbs (words that tend to end with “ly” – a big no-no for writers) and sentences that start with the same words? It would need some simple filtering so “and” “the” and similar words can be omitted from the search field. There are probably other lists it could compile, but these are the tools I can use most.

To be compatible with different document formats, it would probably work best if it were a standalone program that imported the document for the searches, but it would only generate lists – the user would then look for the words and phrases and make corrections in the original document. This could also be a useful plug-in for a word processor or office suite, but I've never actually tried to use a plug-in with Word, WordPerfect or LibreOffice, the programs I use most, and I don't even know if they would utilize a plug-in.

After writing the above, but before posting, I did a web search and found a more comprehensive filtering program than what I've described - SmartEdit by Bad Wolf Software. Pretty pricey at $49. I didn't find anything else out there with these basic search parameters. There are programs like Word Counter for Mac by Supermagnus Software, but it is more a word counter than a phrase and sentence start tool. And I'm not on a Mac.

Any thoughts?

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General Software Discussion / Who is still runnig XP?

« on: January 25, 2013, 10:32 AM »

Just curious if you are running XP as your main OS, and why?

I still run XP for my audio production work and have a PC I had built in 2008 doing all the heavy lifting. It works like new, has never crashed, and for stability and reliability purposes there is no need to change it. But I think change is coming - many of us stayed with XP because there were so many failures with Vista that developers stayed away and XP remains the most stable OS for many applications. But it appears DAW developers are moving toward 64 bit because of the speed - just because I was curious, I bought a Windows 7 64 bit laptop to try out a 64 bit DAW and it does many functions in about 20% of the time as the same program running XP 32 bit. At some point the speed alone will make working with XP less productive.

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Living Room / The end of FreewareBB

« on: January 24, 2013, 01:41 AM »

http://www.freewarebb.com/

Perhaps the site wasn't of great interest to DC members but I often found useful little programs browsing through the categories or reading recent reviews. Marko seemed to be carrying the load alone and his announcement is a bit of a downer - you can sense his fatigue in the words he writes. Honorable of him to refund the $1 anyone spent for a "verified membership" for one year. All the best to him in his next endeavor.

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General Software Discussion / WinPatrol Plus or AnVir Task Manager?

« on: January 17, 2013, 11:06 PM »

I have both WinPatrol Plus and AnVir Task Manager installed on my computers but my right brain dominates and I can easily got lost using what to others is routine software. If you have used one or both, what do you like/dislike about it? Strengths or weaknesses? I did do a search here for both programs, but it has been a while and several updates since there was meaningful discussion about either. Each definitely misses things the other catches, and I haven't yet figured out how to harness the full potential of either program. Any opinions? I think this is a timely topic given the current member discount for WinPatrol Plus - and an opportunity to encourage others to check out the other discounts available.     

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Post New Requests Here / Another project timer

« on: December 21, 2012, 09:53 PM »

After searching for months (a couple of years off and on is more accurate) and not finding what I need I’m posting it here - a simple project timer that tracks project times, does time computations and stores the data as text files. It would be stand-alone and have the capability to run in multiple applications at once. The data stored would include the project, subtask for that project, date, start/stop times, total time for task, with a column for total time for project to date.

Generating a report would be a nice option, but to keep it simple it would not need to generate one. It could save data to an excel spread sheet that can be printed and attached to an invoice or client billing statement, but for my personal use, I send a letter to the client with the billing included in a subparagraph, so I would want the info available as copy/paste text.

A necessary option would be that the text fields can be edited – for instance, if I took a bathroom break and forgot to stop the timer, that could be corrected by changing the start/stop times and the elapsed time gets corrected accordingly. If I ended up combining tasks for that project, the task description field can be edited.

I have tried out about 20 project timers from all over the web, but most are overly complicated to use or don’t create text files or don’t run in multiple applications or only generate reports or only export to google calendar, etc.  Anuran and TaskClerk are useful for telling me what I did, but I need something I trigger to track my work hours. Any thoughts?