Recent Posts

326

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2015, 01:28 PM »

Well, here's a wrinkle: In ublock, I can't get it to block Chessbase's embedded live-blitz frame, but it's blocked on Adblock Latitude. (I am really sensitive to moving things on a page!)

-TaoPhoenix (April 17, 2015, 01:21 PM)

chessbase dot com, the live chessboard in the top right column?

Was pick-and-blockable with uBlock Origin 0.9.4.2 in Chrome... my FireFox has enough panzer that I'd have to disable some of it to even see the board

327

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2015, 01:17 PM »

It appears to be uBlock Origin in Chrome now after some sort of kerfuffle (as reported here by ghacks), fwiw.

-x16wda (April 17, 2015, 08:04 AM)

Ugh, Google.

Also, the split between "uBlock Origin" and "uBlock" is a bit ho-humm. As I understand, the original author (gorhill) got overwhelmed by all the requests demands from users - which can indeed be overwhelming when you're doing something as a hobby project. Seems like the new maintainer (chrisaljoudi) might not have handled his responsibilities super well ("made with love and care by Chris." + donate button, not even mentioning gorhill on his site), so... meh.

This drama and uncertainty is disheartening, since the ublock engine has substantial advantages compared to the older adblock.

328

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2015, 07:40 AM »

Btw, for FireFox it's important to install µblock from the GitHub link I posted, it's not updated anywhere near regularly from the official addon repository.

-f0dder (April 17, 2015, 03:25 AM)

-does this mean, f0dder, that you are recommending the beta versions?

-Curt (April 17, 2015, 06:56 AM)

Perhaps not beta versions, but definitely from GitHub rather than the Mozilla repository - I'm on 0.9.3.0 for my FireFox install.

Pardon my French, I think uBlock is youBlock, not microBlock.

-Curt (April 17, 2015, 06:56 AM)

Hm, it seems you are right - it's "uBlock" in both Chrome and FireFox and now. Definitely used to be µblock.

329

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2015, 03:25 AM »

Use a decent ad-blocker (the really nice µblock is available for firefox now as well!)...

-f0dder (April 15, 2015, 01:19 PM)

I haven't heard of uBlock before. I just installed it.
Heh is there any problem running both uBlock and AdBlock at the same time?

-TaoPhoenix (April 16, 2015, 05:07 PM)

They both use the same filter lists, so at best the blocker that runs last will do nothing.

µblock simply has a better engine than the adblock core, and uses less memory and CPU - so disable adblock and see if you run into any issues, you can always uninstall (or reenable) later . Btw, for FireFox it's important to install µblock from the GitHub link I posted, it's not updated anywhere near regularly from the official addon repository.

330

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2015, 03:21 AM »

CTRL+RALT+163 types: ¡¼³

-kalos (April 16, 2015, 12:30 PM)

Did you try Ctrl+RightAlt+Shift+3?

331

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 02:23 PM »

You need Ctrl+RightAlt+Shift.

If that doesn't work, you'll probably need to look at keyboard remapping. Windows has native support for doing that (since win2k, I believe?), but no user interface. You can find a 3rd-party tool that sets up the necessary registry keys - it's been years since I used such a tool, though, so can't remember which one I used.

332

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 01:45 PM »

ralt+shift+4 does nothing

-kalos (April 15, 2015, 01:31 PM)

Try adding in a ctrl, since ctrl+alt == altgr. Works for me on win7.

333

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 01:25 PM »

it doesn't work

-kalos (April 15, 2015, 01:15 PM)

For it to work, you need to use "United States - International" and not the plain-Jane US layout. If you're in doubt how to change the layout, check this link.

334

General Software Discussion / Re: Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 01:19 PM »

Anyone got an useful $.02 to chip in?

-oblivion (April 11, 2015, 09:50 AM)

First, don't bother with any product that includes a firewall. There's really no good reason to use anything but the built-in Windows stuff... unless you're one of those paranoid enterprisey corporations, and then you'd run fascist outgoing firewalls at your internet edge, not individual machines.

Second, I haven't seen any good reasons to use anything but MSE for anti-malware for several years. The 3rd-party offerings are bloated, resource-intensive, buggy (to the point of sometimes borking your system, like Panda recently did), and try to legitimize themselves through fear-mongering.

Just stick with MSE, keep MalwareBytes/whatever if you accidentally miss a double-negative checkbox for installing browser toolbars from shareware, and browse responsibly.

Use a decent ad-blocker (the really nice µblock is available for firefox now as well!), add in Ghostery, and do not use the Java and Flash plugins for your browser - if you need flash, use Chrome's built-in flash support, even if your primary browser is firefox.

EDIT: changed µblock link to gorhill "origin" instead of chrisaljoudi because of ongoing controversy.

335

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 12:31 PM »

He mentioned this is an American laptop so I'm doubtful it has an AltGr key.

-skwire (April 15, 2015, 12:29 PM)

Ah, "right alt" probably works in that case.

336

General Software Discussion / Re: pound symbol

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2015, 12:17 PM »

It's not part of the standard US keymap, so you'll need to do alt+scancode, or use the windows key remapping feature.

Or, change to the "United States - international" map, and press altgr+shift+4.

337

Living Room / Re: Please help Archive Team save Friendfeed's content

« Last post by f0dder on April 09, 2015, 03:22 AM »

 

338

Living Room / Re: mp3 sharing?

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2015, 05:59 PM »

My main concern is if FLAC has the same broad support base and applicability as .wav.

-bit (April 08, 2015, 05:28 PM)

WAV has been around since the start of the 90'es, so no - FLAC certainly loses there, hands-down.

The more interesting property, though, is whether FLAC has the necessary applicability, for you and your audience. You should divide that question in two: 1) you, 2) your audience.

For you, there will probably be some adjustments to make. Does the software you currently use in your workflows support FLAC? Do you need to do manuel conversions? FLAC is certainly the superior format - it takes quite less disk space while still retaining 100% audio quality, and it contains checksums to detect corruption (plus a boatload of other things). If it isn't supported well by your current workflow, perhaps there's some better alternatives to the software you use? Distribution sites that accept lossless uploads really ought to support at least WAV and FLAC (I'm not in the industry, though - there might be brain-dead sites that don't accept FLAC).

For your audience, who currently deal with WAV files? In my experience, "normal" end-users only see MP3, and the "high-end" users that can handle WAV would accept FLAC just as well. As it's a lossless format, if anybody complains "but it's compressed", they'd be the same kind of stupid that buy Monster Audio cables or seriously believe vinyl offers an objectively better audio quality than digital formats

339

General Software Discussion / Re: Ad blocking add-ons in Pale Moon 25

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2015, 01:24 PM »

TaoPhoenix: ABP certainly has "show acceptable ads", but as an option, and not hardcoded. I'm OK with that (it's optional, the ads are unobtrusive, and it might be good for the overall balance... I'm still using ABE, though). ABE is supposed to not have any of that :-s

Anyway, looking forward to µblock is ready for firefox... and oh, after a quick check just now, it seems that it's in preliminary stages.

340

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2015, 01:19 PM »

Sorry, it took me a while to get back to this (I didn't have time to fiddle with 10). It starts with 3 for the first tab/page, added a forth for the 2nd tab, then held there for the 3rd tab. Added another for the 4th tab, and held there for the next 7. The 8th tab finally added another instance of the .exe.

So...I'll go with yes on this one.

-Stoic Joker (April 08, 2015, 06:44 AM)

So they still use tab/process grouping, instead of a process per tab - good

341

Living Room / Re: Please help Archive Team save Friendfeed's content

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2015, 03:26 AM »

it's worth noting that VirtualBox will not work if you have a modified version of uxtheme.dll (which has to be modified if you want to use non-windows themes for the OS).
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13767

-tomos (April 07, 2015, 04:21 AM)

Damn, that's arrogant!

342

General Software Discussion / Re: Ad blocking add-ons in Pale Moon 25

« Last post by f0dder on April 08, 2015, 03:24 AM »

This seems like silly politics to me - if the rendering engine and internals are from mainline Firefox, just identify as that, regardless of using an old UI...

Adblock Latitude is designed to be a drop in replacement for ABP and will utilize all your exsisting settings. However, ABL is more than that. It intends to also replace Adblock Edge by removing the hard coded Acceptable Ads feature."

-TaoPhoenix (April 07, 2015, 03:28 PM)

Huh, isn't the removal of Acceptable Ads one of the things that Adblock Edge is all about, and why it was forked from Adblock Plus?

343

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows goes Open Source?!!

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 05:48 PM »

One difference.  .NET was documented.  To program Windows using the API without being left behind you had to get "undocumented Windows" programming books.  Some guy had to sit there for months debugging the OS to see what MS did when they wrote their own programs that they didn't tell us.

-MilesAhead (April 05, 2015, 03:11 PM)

Sorry, but that's bullshit.

Yes, you needed reversed engineering if you wanted to do Really Funky Things - but you never (Win95+, anyway) needed it for normal application programming. The "undocumented Windows" was for people who wanted to do nice applications for the tweaker types who thought they knew what they were doing, for some of the antivirus people, and for (some of) the people who removed copy protections for the enjoyment of y'all.

344

General Software Discussion / Re: Best VM Creation Solution

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 05:29 PM »

questorfla: virtualization generally doesn't help you in determining bottlenecks or determine problems - it's more of a way to lower costs, or get high availability by sacrificing performance. It does sounds like it might be a good idea for you to explore, though, given your current isssues.

Stuff like "no way to automate the process and it would take hand entry", "additional charges for doing anything" and "the same .bak file with the same size and same date" makes me very suspicious about all companies involved. Converting from one database to another shouldn't require manual processing - of course if your data is junk, it might require massaging if you wanted to sanitize your entire system... but just moving from one DB backend to another? No.

Your first main concern will be getting the data from one database to another (if necessary) - if you can do that step, virtualization should be trivial in comparison. Performance troubleshooting tends to need a mix of watching database counters and application instrumentation.

345

General Software Discussion / Re: 'create Restore Point' question

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 05:08 PM »

^f0dder - My case is a 'no frills' aluminum LianLi which I like value very highly, so if or when I can ever do a full PSU+Mobo+CPU+Ram+GPU upgrade, I may try to save the case.

-bit (April 06, 2015, 05:00 PM)

Ah doh, missed that it was the case you were worried about, silly me - that should keep working, ATX standard and all.

If I get a chance, I'll pick up an SSD HD as an easy speed boost.

-bit (April 06, 2015, 05:00 PM)

It does tend to help a lot. After a certain level of cpu, ram and gpu upgrades, SSD is the biggest performance upgrade you'll get for a while. I don't personally care a lot about OS boot speed, but everything disk-related just gets more responsive with an SSD. Just remember to have solid backups - when the consume drives die, they still tend to brick entirely.

346

General Software Discussion / Re: 'create Restore Point' question

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 04:21 PM »

I've wondered if my 8 year old case could take a new mobo/cpu/ram upgrade combo and transfer everything else over (maybe even save the four 1GB ram sticks), and what a good econo mobo/cpu combo might be (AMD seems cheaper than Intel).

-bit (April 06, 2015, 12:31 AM)

With that age, you'll be looking at a full PSU+Mobo+CPU+Ram+GPU upgraded. You can probably salvage the GPU if you aren't doing anything intensive, but it's likely to die within too long if it's in that age range... but for the rest, it really is a full upgrade. New CPU socket, new RAM type.

A thing, though... do you have any nvidia firewall thingy installed? That was one extremely source of instability when I ran AMD hardware from around that time. I'd also suggest you to migrate your data and break up the raid, I had some pretty bad experiences with amd/nforce raid (and ATi before that) from back then - can't remember the details, but from googling back then, I wasn't the only one. And it resulted in pretty bad data loss.

Although SSD's work fine with SATA2 ports, SSD's really start to work for you when you connect these to SATA3 (a.k.a 6g)

-Shades (April 06, 2015, 08:08 AM)

SSDs are a big performance boost at any level, even at SATA1 (150MB/s) you'll have trouble finding HDDs today that can keep up that speed at then entire disk surface... and the random seek time is always going to be better. It's only the most recent SSDs that need more than SATA2 (300MB/s) too reach max sustainedperformance. The very top models these days need faster than SATA tho

347

Living Room / Re: mp3 sharing?

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 03:57 PM »

I would have to say that if you have anything worth sharing with other people, or even saving for yourself, you should save it in FLAC format. It's easy to do, it's better quality than MP3, it takes less disk space than the original .wav.

348

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2015, 03:00 PM »

is it really ready for fully upgrading OS?
(I wouldnt chance it myself, not yet anyways)

-tomos (April 06, 2015, 08:30 AM)

It's a preview, so obviously: no

(It's not on general Windows Update yet - WU is just the delivery platform if you opt-in)

349

General Software Discussion / Re: TrueCrypt alternative

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2015, 01:24 PM »

I'm very pleased to hear that TrueCrypt has been audited and deemed secure.

-Innuendo (April 04, 2015, 09:44 AM)

Please note that it has only been partially audited (last time I checked, anyway, several months ago. Haven't heard any news about the audit, but haven't followed up, either. No wonder if all that has been stalled a bit with the project shutdown and forking...) - but the partial work has been reassuring. And yes, an audit is necessary for a project like TrueCrypt, since the "many eyes" argument of open source has failed again and again.

However, for those who do have 'super important' stuff to secure or those who are exceptionally paranoid or security-conscious, something Linux-based or OpenBSD-based is the only way to go. No. Really. It *is* the *only* way to go. Open source, the ability to compile everything yourself, security permissions down to the per-file level are just a few of the tools for the security-minded individual to protect what he feels is worth protecting.

-Innuendo (April 04, 2015, 09:44 AM)

Windows/NTFS has way more fine-grained access control than you find on your typical *u*x, but other than that, yeah. Kinda. Reflections on Trusting Trust and all that - but it certrainly is easier to get a feeling of confidence with an open-source stack...

350

General Software Discussion / Re: TrueCrypt alternative

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2015, 04:17 AM »

I'm with TrueCrypt 7.1a for my offline storage until one of the TC forks mature, and dm-crypt on my file server.

The algorithms are industry-standard, there seems to be no planted backdoors, and so far the issues found by the audit have been minor - there's no viable cold-attacks, which is the only thing that really matters. Yeah, being able to tweak the PBKDF2 rounds would be good, but that is really just a password brute-force mitigation, not a super big issue.

As for why the TC authors decided to pull the plug, perhaps we'll never know. My guess, though, is that it's a combination of two simple factors:
1) Fatigue/Real-Life. The authors worked on the project for more than 10 years.
2) Technical issues supporting it on modern OSes.

Issue #2 deserves a more thorough explanation. Basically, the only way to use TrueCrypt entirely securely on Windows is using an encrypted system partition. If you only use it for data partitions, you risk your encryption keys leaking to your page or hibernation files. You can't entirely avoid these issues through code (disabling hibernation and paging should be OK, though, but most people don't/can't run like that).

Supporting encrypted system partition requires some pretty low-level code, and UEFI booting changes everything. Combine fatigue with the massive amount of work it would be supporting UEFI-booting and the fact that both OSX and Windows now have very good built-in encryption, and you have an Occam's Razor of the discontinuation. (I'm sure NSA don't mind that the project was stopped, but I don't really think they flexed their muscle).

As for MS BitLocker and Apple FileVault, I would be very, very, very surprised if they contained backdoors. Those are the encryption systems I'd use for company laptops, and certainly not slow junk like Symantec and others produce. I'm pretty confident there's no cold-attacks against BL or FV.

However, if I were up to mischief, I wouldn't use either of the two... but that's because I'd never do mischievous things on Windows or OSX... there's so many other way for Apple, Microsoft and others to Get Root on those systems if you're become targeted.