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801

General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 07, 2007, 02:49 AM »

Husbands are no good with software  Whenever I let mine use my machine for anything, something breaks 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 06:16 PM »

Yes, I have a lot of those on a write protected USB key - hijack this, rootkit unhooker, process watchers and a few other no-install utilities. Plus installers for a few basics. Cause it doesnt matter which friend or family I might be visiting, the matter of the neighbour whose pc is weird will come up. Wouldjamindtohavealookfiveminutes.... Sometimes I evade, but often i just comply...

I think security is one of the areas where there are a huge number of free versions which do a great job.

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Living Room / Re: Technology Myths

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 06:04 PM »

You need to be clever as to how you write your code and of course you would structure this to keep the parts that need to know about the database and SQL into one place. But there is not necessarily a need to make it all database-independent. I meant what's the point of having something like Oracle, or postgres, or sql server if you cannot use some of their powerful features and extensions?

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General Software Discussion / Re: ESET Smart Security

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 12:04 PM »

That's often a problem with all suites - one or two good modules and the rest added "because you need it to compete"

It used to be a firewall was a packet filter, and you had other tools to watch for trojans, leaks, registry changes. Now a firewall is supposed to block all these.

It used to be a virus scanner was about protecting from viruses but now they need a spyware and spam module too...

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Living Room / Re: Technology Myths

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 12:01 PM »

sometimes it is a good idea to have that flexibility that an abstraction layer brings, and sometimes it isnt.

That's one technology myth though, that one database is just as good as another - specifically that "mysql" is as good as any other and could replace them all. I hear that one a lot.

There's another one that thinks that for anything serious you have to use Oracle.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 11:56 AM »

A lot of people have 2 AV solutions. The trick is you can only have ONE active as a resident, on-access scanning and use the other one only for full scans every night.

People who want the absolute best spend a lot of time on places like the wilders security forums and have multiple solutions for everything, own licenses to several av and switch around which one they use as the resident solution as the flavor of the month changes... They try to use the one they think is best as up-front detection for the resident one, and the one which is best at disinfection as the full-scan solution...

I think it is overkill, as I am rather careful by nature, but on a shared pc where some teens or children might bring their friend's USB drive then it might just be a good move.

For most of us, we can stick with one.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Tor - The Onion Router

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 11:45 AM »

It is also a good idea to use tor for non sensitive stuff, as it increases the security of the network for all.

I use tor as a proxy when on the road, and sometimes from home. I am considering making a node too, I think the whole concept is quite important.

Besides, that way if I really have something sensitive one day it wont be too obvious (can't be too paranoid!). But besides i live with someone whose work could one day be deemed sensitive so it's not a bad idea to start early

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General Software Discussion / Re: SyncBackSE vs. SuperFlexible

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 11:39 AM »

I tried hyperbackup at the time and I liked it - it is a great default scheme and a shame more tools don't use that kind of approach (the only one i know is regrun for its registry backup). Most schedulers can't even allow you to manually set up an approach like this

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General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 04:32 AM »

The interesting thing is that Scott Finnie whose article in 2006 started this thread, is currently calling NOD the best AV in 2007 (although only the AV, not the suite)

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 03:49 AM »

I guess it depends on what you call "cheap enough"

Apart from bitdefender and avira we are talking £60/year/machine on many of the top ones. Not quite feasible if like me you keep many machines for testing, faffing around with.
Also feels a bit pricey for my mum etc.

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Living Room / Re: Technology Myths

« Last post by iphigenie on November 06, 2007, 03:42 AM »

I don't think it will if people read the text properly, since it is about stupid claims people make about their products of choice or against their product of choice's main rivals. I think it is a fun list to keep as it really often sounds like snake oil or magic cure thinking... and putting the ones about macs / windows / linux side by side is always fun as they all end up claiming the same things "mine is better just because!!!!"

On all sides of any technology debate there are many people who will have decided that product/technology/language X is clearly superior, because it works for them. And they feel kind of threatened or insulted by any criticism of their product of choice. So they make pronouncements like these above. You get this from the MS crowd but also from the linux crowd, the mac users, and the mozilla/firefox crowd, and about a dozen different niches. And worst of all in the programming languages debates.

The pragmatic truth is:
- everyone has been copying/inspired by everyone else for the past 40 years. Nobody could have come up with all these concepts in a vaccuum.
- When we think we identified the originator of an idea they probably themselves had been inspired by someone else
- 80% of anything is recycled from previous products/os/languages. Even if the code was totally rewritten from scratch the concepts/ideas/interfaces have been recycled
- 75% of the features someone says are wonderful things about their chosen product/os/language actually come from other products (goes up to 95% in the linux world as advocates think all open source software in their distro is "linux")
- there is no "better" language/OS/program in an universal sense, although there are "better" choices for specific types of tasks
- the fact that someone who knows a product really well can make it do something the product wasnt initially made for DOES NOT MEAN that the product is a good choice for that type of tasks for anyone else.
- most people havent tried enough products/os/programs to be able to really realise where their product of choice is the better choice and where it isnt. which to me means I can ignore them - I think in some circles (Ada) it is called Nebbe's rule: "if you can't think of one are in which the language you are criticising is better than your language of choice, then you aren't competent enough to comment on it in the first place"

(percentage numbers made up, i didnt do formal research on that one. I went at it with a cookie cutter as is proper in this kind of cases although i bet the real numbers are probably higher)

You'll agree that the myths are much more fun than the pragmatic truth.

And as mentioned just above, the fun thing is that the OS/language/product mentioned is interchangeable

812

General Software Discussion / Re: best clipboard program

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 12:16 PM »

I saw some software solution that sounded really "neat" on that front the other day, something that claimed it hooked into key applications and was able to save snaps of your work, using spyware tech but smartly... but I cannot remember it at the moment to check if my memory is playing games or not

The options I am aware of:

- pick the right tool for working your text, one that autosaves a lot... then use a version archiver to keep copies

- find a keylogger program which has backup-oriented options (meaning you can tell it to ignore text typed except in certain contexts like the text windows of any text/editor/web browser/email client etc. and ignore keys).
The problem with normal keyloggers is that without a lot of analysis it is hard to tell what was text, and what might have been selected and deleted later.

- use a lightweight macro recorder tool and run it while you are working. this means you can rerun what you did later. Not sure what kind of resource and disk usage that would cause, though. Same problem you already mentioned about the

- use a tool that does regular screenshots as a backup. and character recognition. Included for completeness!

- use a tool that saves everything you select and regularly select the text you are working on, without having to copy. This is a bit like a clipboard manager but without having to copy. Works beautifully if like me you select while you think
Again the issue is that what you select to copy/past or delete also gets saved and you wont know the difference

- learn to press the save key a lot. I think there was a discussion lately about how to do a script that would force it.

All right, I agree with you there has to be a better way

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 11:44 AM »

F0dder: Yes but if he manually ran something then the virus scanner's on-access protection should have kicked in and caught it! I think it seems avast has indeed missed that one or it fell outside the scope of the free product.

Icekin: Glad you were ok clearing it all though.

To go back to the indirect question in the thread, as we are all software junkies anyway:

You might not get the same level of smooth packaged protection from free products, but you can build a very secure PC with free products - you just need 5+ layers of them:

A free virus scanner, I tend to recommend avira for people who can put up with its slightly "techie" feel and not be intimidated. But avg, avast and a few others all give a good protection against viruses, normally! The difference between free virus scanners and commercial ones is typically not the virus protection but all the other things you get around it: additional layers of protections (spyware, trojans etc.), easier interface etc.
On some of my pcs I use bitdefender, the commercial version but this is newly available in a light free version. Not sure how it compares but I suspect the definitions are in sync with the commercial product. On my mom and some friend's pcs I use avast or avira.

A free firewall - I am not up to date on these at all

Another layer of protection is to have something like winpatrol (or any similar "changes" watcher) to watch for suspicious changes in IE configuration, or the registry etc. I use winpatrol (free) and regrun (not free) on different PCs and might buy WP pro just to support it.

Another layer are the trojan and spyware tools - I use boclean, SpywareGuard, SpywareBlaster. They are simple and quite unobtrusive.

And a good backup/image tool, as sometimes it is easier to roll back than try to clean.

Theres a lot more sophisticated stuff available for free, my head buzzes everytime i go to wilder's security forums, i cant keep up with that field anymore! You have application walls and registry guards, spyware scanning tools and resident sniffers and virtual sandboxes...

I stick with less intensive methose as I have a rather conservative behaviour and dont think I need that many layers.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Idea request: "Site discovery tool"

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 10:57 AM »

Thanks icekin, I can see you spent a lot of time thinking about these things 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Idea request: "Site discovery tool"

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 08:46 AM »

Technorati has quite a niche focus, but I see what you mean.

We already use a lot of feed aggregators and the like. Our guy already checks a lot of these, and hangs out in forums etc. But I am trying to make his job easier as it can easily takes hours out of the day just to find a few tidbits of missing informaton.

I guess what I want is something to help us find the bits that dont make it on to these. The pages that are too specialist, or have nothing funny or trendy, but have real useful information to our topic. Pages that are at the bottom of technorati or similar sites, sites that are on page 2000 on google, sites that havent yet made it, hidden on information rich pages on company websites.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Idea request: "Site discovery tool"

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 08:25 AM »

I can't remember why i didnt like it the last time, could have just been my mistrust about google or it didnt go "deep" enough. But I will try it again since you say it can work with hundreds of them  .

Thanks

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General Software Discussion / Idea request: "Site discovery tool"

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 08:03 AM »

I'm trying to find a pragmatic solution to the following task:

Find new pages/sites/posts around a set of topics in as automated a way as possible, in an ongoing way.
By new I mean either is newly arrived/posted, or not seen before because too "deep" in the "dark" web so we havent gotten to the 21000th page on google where they are...

So in a way it would be a tool that
- is able to trawl a bunch of directories, blogs, feeds
- is also able to run a whole list of searches in google/yahoo/ask etc. or some aggregator sites, possibly starting at page 100 to avoid all the noisy stuff at the top
- gather all URLs referred in this
- then it should be able to discard any site/url previously seen aka 'greylist') so as to produce a list of new things to review
- update the greylist

In a way this combines features from a search tool, and update watcher tool, a web ferret, and URL catcher etc.

If I had to write it I would probably write a perl application with a topic manager, a web crawler, possibly even plug in a bayesian toy to help ignore spammy sites, a results list with preview... But I dont have time, and I am not sure this is something I can just commission and hope to get something workable (= better than using manual methods) at a reasonable cost.

So it got me thinking about how some of the benefits of this tool might be achieved by combining existing tools, say by plugging website watcher with search engine results URLs with the different search terms hard coded in each. Now this doesn't quite work, as WSW would highlight too many other changes in content rather than purely new stuff, but there just might be ways...

So it's not really a coding snack, it's more of a software jigsaw puzzle.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 07:09 AM »

Although free/cheap security has to start with the user - if you are careful and on the paranoid side systematically, then you can do very well with just one free or commercial security tool..

if you want to do silly things like plugging unknown USB data sources into your system without previously telling your AV to be ready to do an in depth dont-trust-it scan  , or downloading things from shady filesharing places, open weird email attachments or saying yes to every popup... then you need to buy several layers of security software.

Any single product will always miss something.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Does reliable PC security have to cost money?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 07:03 AM »

I don't think it is a free vs pay thing - after all avg, antivir and bitdefender (possibly more) all also have a free product, and avast has a commercial product.

It could be that Avast missed it, that avast was slow with updating their definitions for that one. Or it could be that you previously told it to ignore a kind of alert that was similar to that, or told it not to scan your USB drives quite as aggressively (if you rarely plug other people's drives) or some other config choice you made (level of protection, frequency of upgrades)... It is quite possible that your year-old config was no longer as good as the out-of-the-box config of these other products (or possibly even that the out-of-the-box config a new avast install would have)...

Every year, one or two of the av makers will have an off period where they start missing some viruses, i.e. be up to a week late compared to others with reacting to particular threats. They tend to then catch up and it happens to another one. A few products are more consistently good, but even them have phases where they fall behind on one kind of threat or another.

Avast is not top for detection, but it is solid. It is a good tool for people who go on the web etc. and arent very comfortable around computer lingo. It feels friendlier in its messages and approach for casual consumers. Some products have higher absolute security but could be less secure in "casual" hands as it is to hard to understand what the messages are saying etc.

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Living Room / Re: Pet Peeve: I will never buy a rechargeable mouse again for as long as i live

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 06:54 AM »

I have a love-hate relationship with wireless too. I keep falling for the idea of free movement only to find myself in a world of connection problems and dying batteries before the month is out.

When the computer doesnt move I stick with wired, because I never have a problem with wires getting in the way on the desktop.

When the computer moves, as a laptop, I have gone back to wireless. Cables get always messed up in a bag. And, now that the usb receiver plugs are so small that you can leave them on the port when packing the machine, wireless is less fiddly than wired (it used to be more fiddly as you would lose the receiver in the depths of the case on a periodic basis).
Of course even there the features of the mouse are more important. I need my 5 buttons and I have this wireless mouse because it was the only mini mouse I found that had 5 buttons, not because it is wireless...

I just recently fell in the trap of wireless for a PC which had gotten moved to the living room as we might want to use it from a distance at times. So it has 2 sets, wired on the desk and a wireless keyboard and a wireless trackball in case we ever want to pick music or watch a DVD or something.

Already I am reminded as to why I fell out of love with the wireless stuff, as it seems to lose its connection when the computer goes asleep :S (strangely enough dont have that problem with the wireless mouse on the laptop, i wonder why)

So on average I will be a cable bore except when it really might make sense to not have a cable...

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General Review Discussion / Re: Best Archive Manager Review: Suggestions

« Last post by iphigenie on November 05, 2007, 06:32 AM »

Thanks giorgio 

I thought you could do it with peazip but when I tried it it named the file with the name of the first one and I mistakenly thought "hmm, maybe it only does one file at a time". Glad to know my first instinct was right.

Peazip is my compression tool of choice, I have mentioned it here a few times. Clean, simple, powerful enough for everything I can think of but with no unnecessary clutter... just lovely. The name is great too

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General Software Discussion / Re: Do I need another anti-virus/malware program or am I paranoid?

« Last post by iphigenie on November 02, 2007, 10:20 AM »

I always want to laugh when I read any line that says "x million people can't be wrong"

I can list a long list of stupid/wrong things that x million people think is true 

Of course this is not to say that avast is a bad product, it is a fine virus scanner. I don't think it is the best of the free ones, but I have installed it at my mothers and a few other places because it can be setup at the right level that it does not stress people unduly.

That is until it times out and then demand they re-register themselves and they have no idea how to do this, something which just happened to my mother and I am not going there until christmas, so thats 2 months of her being made to panic every day by avast saying her license has expired and windows saying her computer is at risk. I bet she wont dare use the net now

For more technical people I usually choose avira personal when I can, as it has a history of being better at detection. Now that there is a bit defender free I need to test it to see how it compares. 

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General Review Discussion / Re: Best Archive Manager Review: Suggestions

« Last post by iphigenie on October 29, 2007, 04:08 PM »

peazip does something that seems to match your description, to me, but i could misunderstand

edit: actually at the moment i cannot make this work, it might say "add to self extracting..." but it creates one file per file :S

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General Software Discussion / Re: Do I need another anti-virus/malware program or am I paranoid?

« Last post by iphigenie on October 29, 2007, 07:11 AM »

Bitdefender gets really good scores in malware/virus detection, but the firewall is pretty simple. Now if you have a decent packet filter on your modem/router then I think it is enough, as it will detect things like programs connecting outwards or changes to configs and the like.

If you dont have a decent packet filter at the entrance of your network, it might be better to turn the bitdefender firewall off and pick a dedicated firewall tool.

825

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Free! (exp Nov 4)

« Last post by iphigenie on October 29, 2007, 06:57 AM »

If you want the latest version of that, Paragon currently have a special on the latest version of this, $49.99 for the "family pack" of 3 licenses