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Recent Posts

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2926
Living Room / Re: Motherboard Advice Needed
« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 08:25 AM »

Is this a case of not liking a dumbed-down BIOS, or actually needing additional options? :)
-f0dder (December 12, 2009, 01:30 AM)
A bit of both actually.  I don't like it because I want more options. ;)
-y0himba (December 12, 2009, 08:02 AM)
Which options do you want, though? If it's not that you need extra options, going out to buy a new motherboard just because the BIOS is a bit dumbed-down seems silly.

I do know where you're coming from, though - I feel handicapped when looking at my laptop BIOS options. At the same time, it's not like I'm missing anything, though.
2927
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions
« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 06:14 AM »
UAC is just a poorly designed fix - it is slightly less poorly designed in 7 than Vista but nevertheless it is and always will be an excuse for not doing the right thing.
-Carol Haynes (December 12, 2009, 05:37 AM)
I don't agree fully with that - it has some problems at the API side, but IMHO it's basically A Good Thing. Even if all poorly written software was fixed to follow the Windows coding guidelines, there'd still be a bunch of applications legitimately requiring admin privileges... requiring every such application to be split into a service and an end-user UI is overkill.

Few, if any, user level applications NEED admin rights to run and if they do they can be written properly so that the relevant parts can be elevated to admin status during setup.
-Carol Haynes (December 12, 2009, 05:37 AM)
Yep, apart from installation, most user level applications shouldn't ever need admin privs.

How about having a system similar to secure layer certificates for website so that any application requiring elevated privileges has to have a certificate (not necessarily from MS) so that you can clearly identify the source of the software. If SSL cert providers broadened their scope to include this kind of cert then it wouldn't cost developers much to certify their apps and it would be a real incentive to get the apps correct in the first place. Multiple certs for different applications from the same developer could be very cheap because the initial identification would go through with the first registration.
-Carol Haynes (December 12, 2009, 05:37 AM)
Interesting idea, and applications have had AuthentiCode signing for quite a while now (though usually you only see it for installers and ActiveX objects). I'm not a super big fan of whitelisting in this context, though... it would definitely have some good uses, but there'd be the risk of opening up backdoors, and crappy software vendors would just require an UAC exception to be added, rather than fixing their software.
2928
Living Room / Re: Motherboard Advice Needed
« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 01:30 AM »
I want to change it since there are not enough options in the Dell BIOS.  It seems they have disabled or dumbed down just about everything.
-y0himba (December 11, 2009, 07:10 AM)
Is this a case of not liking a dumbed-down BIOS, or actually needing additional options? :)
2929
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions
« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2009, 12:46 AM »
Poorly programmed isn't the same as crapware. In this case, it's about not following design guidelines that have been around since, oh I dunno, NT4 or so. It's not about "satisfying the UAC program", stuff throwing UAC prompts simply wouldn't have worked on XP (or win200 or NT4 or anything non-Win9x) when not running with an account with administrative privileges.

And for the case of Everything, it's perfectly fixable: as mentioned before, the program needs to be split into a service running with admin privileges that have access to the MFT, and a GUI frontend that runs privilege-less and communicates with the service. Presto, problem solved. It's been the proper way to handle this kind of thing at least NT4 (I don't have experience with pre-NT4.)

ACDSee breaking probably has nothing to do with UAC but everything to do with poor programming practices... hardcoding locations, doing tings in nonstandard ways, whatever.

What I don't understand is why MS didn't simply make the choice of making all new user accounts default to user level security (and they could have done that back from Windows XP). Most of these issues would have been ironed out long ago. Seems to me that they are too lily livered to do the write thing so they introduce UAC as a kludge to fix something that isn't basically broken - just a bad choice.
-Carol Haynes (December 11, 2009, 07:40 PM)
I agree fully that MS should have made the default user non-admin a long time ago - preferably at the time of Win2000, and definitely no later than WinXP when people really started migrating from Win9x. Also, WinMe should never have seen the light of day, Win98 should have been the last 9x Windows.

I find UAC to be a pretty nice system, though - the alternative would be having to run applications in admin mode and always supplying an admin password in order to be able to do so...
2930
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions
« Last post by f0dder on December 11, 2009, 12:01 PM »
Yes, Program Files has proper NTFS permissions set, which is why UAC pops up when poorly programmed applications try to write to their install folder :)

As for Everything popping up an UAC prompt, that's quite natural as well: it reads the MFT directly, which isn't something you want just any application to do... if Everything had been properly designed, it would consist of a service backend and a GUI frontend.
2931
fSekrit / Re: LATEST VERSION: fSekrit 1.40 shrinkwrapped!
« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2009, 04:34 AM »
Nice!
any hope for more features? :)
-Greybrow (December 10, 2009, 04:26 AM)
Yep, I have a few more ideas before declaring the project "final" :)

I'd like to have those:
1. Setting to choose if cursor should be at the beginning, the end or the last remembered position
2. Setting to paste current date/time on the end of file, on opening (as default for notepad with .LOG in the first line)
-Greybrow (December 10, 2009, 04:26 AM)
Good ideas - I'm planning to upgrade the container/document format so I can add arbitrary new settings without requiring further modification of the document format. Once that's done, saving settings like this per-document will be a breeze :)
2932
Living Room / Re: Recording industry charged with copyright infringement
« Last post by f0dder on December 10, 2009, 01:57 AM »
Saw this a couple of days ago, and I'm loving it :-*
2933
Living Room / Re: 32Bit or 64Bit? How long will they last as the most used? Take your best guess
« Last post by f0dder on December 09, 2009, 06:09 PM »
End users don't need 64 bit yet. Never seen a home user having to work with files of that size.
(So most things he does is whinging in boards "why does my application not start in 64 bit mode?" ...)
-Tuxman (December 09, 2009, 04:22 PM)
You don't need a 64bit CPU to handle huge files - it just makes it easier to do so with memory-mapped files. There's home users authoring their own BluRay discs...

Ah, yes, 8 GB RAM. 6 of those will never be used anyway, but who cares ...  ;D
-Tuxman (December 09, 2009, 04:25 PM)
Oh really? Depends on how many applications you run. Also, on a 64bit OS, 32bit applications (the ones marked large-address aware) can utilize full 4GB of memory, WoW64 doesn't have the 2:2/3:1 memory split that 32bit Windows has.
2934
fSekrit / Re: LATEST VERSION: fSekrit 1.40 shrinkwrapped!
« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2009, 04:17 PM »
For mail I'd prefer PGP or S/MIME, if the people I'm communicating with have mail clients supporting it... integration w/mail client = easier to use, and you avoid pesky antivirus programs going apenuts over an attached .exe file.

But I guess a lot of people don't have support for PGP or S/MIME, or can't figure out how to use it - I guess fSekrit isn't the worst alternative then :)
2935
General Software Discussion / Re: Lazarus-type program for plain text editors?
« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2009, 03:39 PM »
Doesn't UltraEdit have an auto-backup feature? Considering it's amount of features and pricetag I would kinda expect it to. Other than that, Ctrl+S is a very handy keyboard shortcut that's pretty easy to press, even one-handed :P
2936
General Software Discussion / Re: which system tray network monitor - like a graph or something.
« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2009, 07:25 AM »
It seems that you can only eliminate LAN traffic, not display both LAN and WAN traffic separately. Maybe there is another tool that can do this.
-bgd77 (December 05, 2009, 06:28 AM)
I used the free version of NetLimiter for a while, it has this ability - but there was something about it that didn't feel "right", dunno if it was resource consumption or the UI or whatever, it's been a while :)
2937
General Software Discussion / Re: which system tray network monitor - like a graph or something.
« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2009, 05:49 AM »
Is this what you need?
-bgd77 (December 05, 2009, 02:13 AM)
If the filtering can be done at "show-time" rather than "capture-time" - I'd kinda like to have stats for both LAN and WAN traffic, but the ability to separate the two :)
2938
General Software Discussion / Re: which system tray network monitor - like a graph or something.
« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2009, 06:26 PM »
Can NetWorx filter by LAN/WAN?
2939
Circle Dock / Re: Circle Dock won't start from WinPE bootable disc
« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2009, 11:11 AM »
Good luck - talk to you in a lifetime ;)
-f0dder (December 04, 2009, 02:23 AM)

I just feel lucky, somebody have done my job :-) With this http://www.colinfinc...eplugs/dotnetfx20pe/, works like a charm. Problem solved, see you!
-gorancheros (December 04, 2009, 07:54 AM)
Good find - you definitely wouldn't have liked doing the thing manually :)
2940
Living Room / Re: Notepad Fun
« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2009, 11:10 AM »
Heh, cute :P
2941
Circle Dock / Re: Circle Dock won't start from WinPE bootable disc
« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2009, 02:23 AM »
Now, the only trick left is to hack registry and add the missing keys (after all, it's all about registry). My plan is to compare the registry of standard W7 installation(which b.t.w. comes with .Net preinstalled) and WinPe registry, export the differential keys that seem to refer to .Net and use them.
-gorancheros (December 04, 2009, 02:17 AM)
Good luck - talk to you in a lifetime ;)
2942
fSekrit / Re: Beta: fSekrit 1.40 needs some abuse!
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 03:32 PM »
Version 1.40 has been released, enjoy - further discussion can take place in that thread.
2943
fSekrit / LATEST VERSION: fSekrit 1.40 shrinkwrapped!
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 03:30 PM »
There, fSekrit 1.40 has been released!

Since stuff mentioned in the beta period should have been mostly addressed, I've decided that 1.40 is ready as an early 2009 christmas present. So, what do we have here?

Version 1.40 - December 3, 2009 - 90kb/45.5kb

  • fixed: file->export appends ".txt" instead of ".exe" if no extension given.
  • fixed:  long-standing bug where failing to save changes when closing fSekrit with a modified document would cause fSekrit to exit, rather than notifying of error and let user attempt to save again.
  • fixed:  saves are *finally* done properly, by saving to a temporary file and replacing the current file only when all the file writing business is done.
  • added:  font selection dialog, no longer do you need to much around with the registry to set another default font. The font is still not stored in your document, though, and is single global per-user registry setting.
  • added: "portable" mode, which (for now) means it will not use %TEMP% to store it's temporary editor executable, but instead store it in the same folder as the opened document. Registry is still used for font selection, though! To enable this feature, create a file called "fSekrit.portable" in the same folder as the document you want to function in portable mode.
  • added: URLs are now recognized and turned into hyperlinks.
  • fixed: Read-only notes should be a lot more sane - changed from confusing "make read-only" that half-worked to "Save As Read-only" that works :)
  • fixed: Win9x and NT4 support has been broken since version 1.35. Release builds are now done with an older compiler toolchain, and 9x/NT4 support is back :)


Enjoy! :)
2944
Circle Dock / Re: Circle Dock won't start from WinPE bootable disc
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 01:32 PM »
Hm, is it possible to install the dotNet runtime on a WinPE image? I don't think you're going to have much success just copying the dotNet DLLs over manually...
2945
General Software Discussion / Re: two more defrag tools - "UltraDefrag" and "Advanced Defrag"
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 01:20 PM »
Diskeeper uses a file system filter driver also. It seems that is to do their defrag process.
-majoMO (December 03, 2009, 01:12 PM)
A driver or a service? It makes sense to use a service for defrag, since it can do it's work in the background without a GUI running... and, if you don't care about security, it will let you launch the GUI non-privileged and control the (privileged) service. PerfectDisk does this.

EDIT: Diskeeper info page mentions it has IntelliWrite, which sounds like something that makes sense implementing as a filter driver:
IntelliWrite prevents up to 85% of the fragmentation every system suffers from. It intelligently writes contiguous files to the disk so system resources are not wasted creating fragmentation. The results? A whole new level of system speed and efficiency.
2946
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 01:16 PM »
Ah, hashing the command and using that as part of the encryption key at least makes the very-trivial attack impossible - at least that's something.
2947
General Software Discussion / Re: two more defrag tools - "UltraDefrag" and "Advanced Defrag"
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 09:47 AM »
majoMO: and that text says absolutely nothing about why they've implemented it via a driver. Defrag API is available to usermode programs, boot-time (chkdsk phase) apps are usermode programs using the NT native API (which has nothing to do with drivers), the ability to defrag system files is because of boot-time not driver, and optimal algorithm is, well, about algorithm and not the use of driver.
2948
Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: Barnacle - Add toolbars to your favorite programs
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 04:39 AM »
Considering the age of Win9x (and that Microsoft has dropped support for it), I guess you should implicitly assume that software doesn't support it - and software authors can then list Win9x explicitly if they went through the hell of supporting that old crap :)
2949
General Software Discussion / Re: ProcessMonitor 1.1 released by SysInternals
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 04:14 AM »
Curt: SysInternals has a RSS feed - quoting from Nov.03.2009:

Process Monitor v2.8: Displays new Windows 7 CreateFile options, includes file-delete operations in the Category filter’s Write subcategory, and displays names for more IOCTLs and result codes.
-http://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals/rss.xml
2950
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 — first impressions
« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2009, 04:11 AM »
MilesAhead: you might not be able to directly read the password in plaintext, but since it's an automated method, what stops you from simply copying the encrypted password and using the sudo tool to launch other stuff?

And since it's automated, it's not going to be very hard to get the plaintext password... memory dump of the sudo process, or knowledge of the encryption method and simply decrypting it yourself.

Of course it's not something that's going to be exploited by malware because it's not a widespread tool, and it's probably only meant for single-user environments. I'd still call it a gaping security hole though :)
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