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Recent Posts

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8526
MS's install system is crap. There are 3 or 4 totally free systems that trump it in most every way, including ease of use (for the install creator). I don't understand why people still use it. :p

- Oshyan
Probably because it has advantages in corporate situations where you want automatic rollout, as well as repair features (even if those cause more problems than they solve, for me anyway).

Is using .MSI installers a requirement for MS Logo certification these days, by the way?
8528
Living Room / Re: Microsoft Backtracks on phone home WGA ...
« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2006, 04:54 AM »
how many business machines have a graphics card with 128Mb of video RAM ?
More than you'd think - since many business machines use low-end on-board graphics with unified memory architecture :)
8529
Developer's Corner / Re: Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years
« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2006, 04:47 AM »
For as long as I've had a clue, I've always despised the "teach yourself X in Y (short) timeunits". It just doesn't work that way. Indeed, do something you find interesting, and if it works for you, continue from there.

One of my younger brothers is playing around with HTML+JavaScript to do some simple graphical effects, as well as some simple LUA scripting for Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2. That seems like a pretty good starting point to me, and I'll nudge him in the right direction if he keeps up his interest in programming.
8530
Living Room / Re: Microsoft Backtracks on phone home WGA ...
« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2006, 04:45 AM »
Amen to that, mouser!

Don't give into big brother's whims, even if they seem harmless.
8531
Look interesting!

MSI is supposed to be oh-so-smart, but to me it's been more of an annoyance than a help :(
8532
Living Room / Re: Seriously?!! I can't hardly believe this
« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2006, 04:42 AM »
I personally hate football (at least as a professional sport - I don't mind my local village league)
Count me in on that view too :)

football (or soccer, for those that insist) is best done for fun with a few friends drinking beer :)
8533
thunder7: there's no proof of backdoors. All there is, is conspiracy theories from nutjobs like Steve Gibson. I haven't come across anything yet that looked like it was intended to be a backdoor. The leaked NT4 and Win2k sources didn't contain anything that looked like backdoors.

Sure, a well-crafted backdoor by a smart person would be designed to look like a bug. But the exploitable bugs so far haven't really smelled like backdoors but rather as genuine programming errors.
8534
General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...
« Last post by f0dder on June 11, 2006, 03:14 PM »
Hm, that guy seems like quite a n00b, sorry :)

Silent operation? Geez, I hate that. I want to KNOW when something bad happens, because that can clue you in that youre visiting a bad internet site or whatever. Silent operation is *bad*. Another reason for me to dislike it is that I deal with computer security in an amount of ways, and sometimes some of my own dealings with PE compression/encryption gives false positives.

Email scanning, ho humm. Never cared much for that, inbound scanning is nifty enough, but if your antivirus package is strong enough, it isn't really necessary anyway. Outbound scanning, if your corporation really needs it, should be done at your internet perimeter anyway - that way, even a rogue laptop accessing your WLAN can't do harm that way.

I'm a LOT more interested in solid detection and a stable filesystem filter driver engine than I am in features like mail scanning, script blocking, etc. Because at the end of the day, if detection and driver isn't done properly, the rest of the features mean zilch.
8535
It is like you go to buy a car, they ok you bought the car!. You go to drive it home they tell, aaah,... the say you have to get it towed to your house, the engine,trasmission, wheels, bracks we will have to send you when there finished.
It's more like... it's working fine, but when you start installing a custom engine and a big-ass stereo system, it'll start failing. (that's for XP SP2 anyway, XP vanilla and SP1 were broken wrt. remote exploitability).
8536
thunder7: did you ever use EMF/WMF graphics format? Probably not, as it's largely a (obsolete) print format. The bug was fixed rapidly. It was pretty serious, yes, but a hidden backdoor? Nah.

And google for "Windows Microsoft Backdoors" gives 129,000 hits? "os x exploits" gives 10,300,000. Which is of course ludicruous, but serves to demonstrate that simple google searches don't show the real problems.

App, since you don't have anything negative to say, you're one of the lucky users of WinMe :). People generally either think "it worked just fine" or "it's the worst system Microsoft ever designed". Win98 2nd Ed. worked pretty well (in the mediocre and crashing easily) way across all systems - WinMe either worked okay, or crashed like hell. At my old hischool, we had to roll back ~50 machines to win98se (trading WinMe licenses to win98 licenses) - not fun.

Updates should continue for IE 6 on all versions of Windows till they retire IE6 for all Windows versions.

If they had no intention on doing this then there shouldn't have been an IE 6 for 9x to begin with.
Ho humm. NT and 9x versions of an application have a lot of codebase in common, there's still some differences, and applications have to be extensively tested before release (you might not think they do this, but they do ;)). I can quite understand why 9x support is being dropped.

And yes, I have been affected by the bug because I installed a 3rd party patch while waiting for an official one and unregistered the required .dll file.
You haven't been affected by the patch then, but by unsupported 3rd-party software ;). In reality, an in-memory patch could have been done that would just remove the problem, since the details are well-known. But nutjobs like Steve Gibson don't have the skills to write something like that.

Interesting that you've had 65 days uptime, considering the ~50-day timestamp counter wraparound thing :)

Funny thing with XP is that *a few* people are having really hellish problems with it too. It's not at the scale of the WinMe problems, though, and I think it can generally be attributed to hardware failure or bad drivers - NT does put more strain on the system, and makes bad stuff break easier.

I've never bothered with long uptimes on windows myself, as I (unless something important is running) turn off my box every night for sleep and power reasons. I know that people using hibernate have had insane uptimes, and I've had 14 days easily (with 12 times hard abuse and 12 times "only downloads and computations").

I've always disabled driver rollback and the likes. If I've shafted my system, I reinstall it to get a decent state. That's probably just me that tends to royally shaft my system when it finally happens :)

8537
fSekrit / Re: Congratulations on fSekrit
« Last post by f0dder on June 11, 2006, 08:55 AM »
Nice :)

I guess lifehacker is a big-ish site since this thread was made? :)
8538
Living Room / Re: SourceForge - wtf - now it's harder to download??
« Last post by f0dder on June 11, 2006, 08:54 AM »
Hmm, I thought sourceforge was already bad enough. I'm not really fond of sites using javascript for things like this. It seems 100% superfluous.
8539
thunder7, once you have Service Pack 2 and recent patches installed, your computer can't (for what I know) be remotely exploited just by being connected to the internet - you'd have to use IE to browse some malicious site, run a trojan, whatever.

Fortunately, even if your original XP install media is vanilla without service packs, you can slipstream SP2+updates and burn a new install media. http://www.nliteos.com + http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn makes this process very easy.

It's unfortunately IE has so many exploits, but at least they're being found and fixed.

And really, don't think that other operating systems and programs aren't full of security issues as well. It's just a lot more interesting to attack Microsoft products for two reasons:

1) it's extremely much more widespread than anything else. If you want a botnet, you're not going to try infecting a few hundred machines if you can get a few hundred thousand.

2) it's political. Lots of people hate Microsoft.

As for apple, ho humm. They had this cute ad that basically claimed they were immune to virus attacks. Try googling for "os x exploit", though. And... http://cad-comic.com...comic.php?d=20060513 :)

As for the security update you linked to, it looks to me like it's just a regular "use IE to visit malicious site, *b00m*" - not like a proper "remote exploit".
8540
Yup, an unpatched XP or 2k box will unfortunately get hammered *very* quickly. It's amazing that people are still routinely probing wide IP ranges to try and infect people... :(
8541
btw...have you noticed that most of the major exploits that have been publicized the last few years have been for NT based versions of Windows while 9x has been IMMUNE to them? (sasser & blaster are the first 2 to come to mind) So much for NT being 'more secure'.  :P

The NT kernel is a lot more secure than the 9x "kernel", and more stable as well. The security problems come from all the usermode crudd added by the incompetent codemonkeys at MS... it's a shame such a nice kernel is tainted by such lousy code for much of the rest of the OS :)
8542
General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.
« Last post by f0dder on June 10, 2006, 03:07 PM »
Hm, if OpenOffice isn't JAVA at it's core, there's really *no* excuse for it being so slow and bloated.
8543
I'm with Josh here.

Microsoft wouldn't intentionally put a backdoor in windows, it would be too much outrage if it was discovered. And with the 55% win2k source leak and even more of the NT4 source, well, it would have been found out.

As for the WMF problem, I really doubt it was planted intentionally. It looks more like a careless reuse of code to me. Of course nutjobs like Steve Gibson claim otherwise, but they're nutjobs after all.

As for WGA, the data it sends back is "like, whatever". But I don't like any kind of "call back home", whether it sends sensitive data or not. It's simply uncalled for, and while you might say "but it doesn't send any personal info" is a slope of acceptance that'll quickly lead us to a nasty Big Brother situation.

8544
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software
« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 10:57 AM »
f0dder: I see - I thought VirtualLock() might be a help, but your explanation makes good sense.
To be honest, I'm not sure whether it is effective on NT or not - but on 9x it's a null stub. I wouldn't think a usermode process would be allowed to lock pages, but perhaps it is... too lazy to look into it right now. But if it works and could be combined with some own-buffer stuff for the richedit, it might be worth looking into.
8545
Sounds interesting, mrainey. I wonder if it goes through some nasty hoops to avoid firewalls, or if it only phones home under certain conditions.

Whatever it is, blocking at a hardware firewall network perimeter works :)
8546
I don't like WGA at all, and I don't like the call-home feature either. I think I'll set up some traffic blocking on the companys PIX501 router/firewall :)
8547
General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.
« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 07:57 AM »
It's a cute little browser, but unless you have *very* basic needs I'm afraid it doesn't cut the cheese - especially the lack of CSS support (try looking at donationcoder.com in it :O).

But a nice little find anyway  :Thmbsup:
8548
General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.
« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 07:03 AM »
Firefox for a machine with 64meg ram is a definite no-go unless you're a masochist. On the other hand, there shouldn't be any reason to go as minimalistic as dIE - standard IE was fine on pmmx-200/64meg. However, standard IE is way too unsafe and featureless, hence the IE-based Avant or Maxthon. Haven't tried Maxthon myself, but Avant was pretty lightweight, had popupblocker, tabs, etc.

Even when removing unnecessary plugins, acrobat reader v6 is still slow on old machines. Really, do try to get a copy of v5.

Of course that's just my observations from when I was stuck with that pmmx-200 box for a couple of months, and my demands on speed might be higher than most people... since they tend to look weirdly at me when I saw firefox, openoffice etc. are slow and bloated :)
8549
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software
« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 05:19 AM »
mwb1100: even VirtualLock isn't guaranteed to keep windows from swapping out pages. If you REALLY need that, you'll have to write a driver - one for 9x, one for NT, one for 64bit NT. And getting those installed etc. wouldn't really fit in the philosophy of fSekrit.

Also, it wouldn't really help - I'm using a standard RichEdit control for the text, and as far as I know it uses it's own memory management and there's no way to change that.

I don't think the paging issue is to be worried about for as small files as fSekrit will probably be used for - and on shared machines, indeed keyloggers and the like are much more real issues.

8550
General Software Discussion / Re: Browser racism???
« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 05:15 AM »
actually Firefox and IE (and clones) are ok, when i tried Opera i got Access denied, but as soon as i change the UserAgent (via Proxo) in Opera to Firefox or IE, Opera could download fine.
Which means that browser racism is in effect, duh :)

Seems pretty silly of the site to do something like that.
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