Posts Tagged ‘test’

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

So I am going through my email yes­ter­day and I come across an email from Tech­Net announ­cing the beta of Mic­ro­soft 2010.

Even though I am a huge sup­por­ter of Open Office, I deci­ded to give it a try. Since I already had a Hot­mail account, the regis­tra­tion was very sim­ple and within 5 minu­tes I was down­loa­ding the installer.

One of the first things I noti­ced when I began to ins­tall the appli­ca­tion, was the options that were not selec­ted. As seen in this screenshot, very few fea­tu­res are ins­ta­lled by default.

The ins­tall did seem to take a bit lon­ger than nor­mal, how much was part of the ins­ta­ller ver­sus my test machine is unde­ci­ded. None the less the ins­ta­ller did not take more than 20 minu­tes or so. Since I spend more time in the Word appli­ca­tion that was where I hea­ded first. It does appear that MS did lis­ten to a lot of users con­cer­ning the start orb and has repla­ced it with the File tab. The remain­der of the rib­bon bar looks remar­kably the same.

When you do go to the file tab, you get a lot more infor­ma­tion at your mouse point without having to do a lot of digging.

So off I go. As I men­tio­ned I use Open Office by default, so the first thing I did was open one of my docu­ments crea­ted in Wri­ter. It did take a few moments to bring the docu­ment up, but all of my for­mat­ting (such as it was) remai­ned. I could even save it back into the .odt exten­sion. There was the war­ning that the for­mat was not com­ple­tely com­pa­ti­ble. I ope­ned the file in Wri­ter again and everything was gol­den. That was a big check mark in my books right there. Mic­ro­soft has been drug over the coals (right­fully so) for not being more com­pa­ti­ble with other appli­ca­tions, this is a good step forward.

The next thing I wan­ted to look at was how it hand­les wri­ting to a blog (not just Mic­ro­soft Live spa­ces). I rea­li­zed how happy I was for the file menu to be back. With a cou­ple of clicks I was being promp­ted to setup my blog con­nec­tion. I selec­ted Word­press and ente­red the ser­ver and login infor­ma­tion. Next time I know, I am wri­ting the entry right now. One of the great fea­tu­res is the screenshot fea­ture. Like the snip­ping tool in Vista and Win­dows 7, the screenshot tool is won­der­ful. When you go to insert you see the option screenshot, with the down arrow, you have the abi­lity to just grab a full win­dow or use the snip­ping tool. All of the ima­ges in this post were crea­ted using this format.

So far, I must say I am actually impres­sed with the direc­tion of at least the Word por­tion. I will play with the excel por­tion later. Check back…

Instructions from the I.T. Department

1. When you call us to have your com­pu­ter moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of post­cards, baby pic­tu­res, stuf­fed ani­mals, dried flo­wers, bow­ling trophies and children’s art.
2. Don’t ever write anything down, espe­cially the error mes­sage that was on your screen.
3. If we ask what the last thing you did was, always res­pond with, “I didn’t do anything.”
4. When we say we’ll be right over, imme­dia­tely find a rea­son to leave so you won’t have to ans­wer silly ques­tions from us, like “what’s your screen saver password?”
6. When desc­ri­bing your pro­blem, just tell us what you were ulti­ma­tely trying to do. For exam­ple, just say, “I can’t get my email”. We don’t need to know that the com­pu­ter won’t even turn on.
7. Feel free to ignore any email sent from us, espe­cially those mar­ked with high impor­tance. You don’t really need to know about the latest virus that wiped out your neigh­bors hard drive.
8. Always send impor­tant and urgent emails in all uppercase.
9. When the copier, or anything else remo­tely elec­tro­nic, doesn’t work, call us. Heck, if we can fix com­pu­ters, we must know all about copiers too.
10. If the docu­ment you sent to the prin­ter didn’t print, send it at least 20 more times. One of them is bound to work.
11. Don’t ever learn the pro­per name for anything tech­ni­cal. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.
12. Don’t waste your time using the built in help files. We already had to learn the hard way, why should you?
13. If any of the com­pu­ter cables are in your way or keep moving, be sure to route them across the top of your por­ta­ble hea­ter or set something big and heavy on them to hold them in place.
14. Never bother rea­ding any mes­sage that pops up on your screen. Just click the X to close it or the first but­ton your mouse gets to.
15. Don’t ever try reboo­ting the com­pu­ter your­self. Call us imme­dia­tely. Only expe­rien­ced, highly-trained pro­fes­sio­nals should attempt that.
16. Feel per­fectly free to say things like “I don’t know anything about this com­pu­ter crap”. We love hea­ring our area of pro­fes­sio­nal exper­tise refe­rred to as crap.
17. When you receive a huge movie file that’s really funny, be sure to for­ward it to all your friends. We have plenty of disk space and bandwidth.
18. Don’t bother brin­ging a radio to work, just lis­ten to music over the inter­net. Like I said, we have plenty of bandwidth.
19. Don’t even think of brea­king large print jobs down into sma­ller chunks. Some­body else might squeeze their one-page docu­ment into the queue.
20. When an I.T. per­son is carr­ying heavy equip­ment, worth thou­sands of dollars, that’s the best time to ask why your screen saver quit working.
21. Don’t bother to tell us when you move com­pu­ter equip­ment around on your own. We cer­tainly don’t need to keep track of those things.
22. Your com­pu­ter case makes a great flat sur­face for sit­ting drinks or pot­ted plants on.
23. Do wha­te­ver you can to cover up those ugly open air slots in the com­pu­ter and monitor.

What’s old is new again

Yes­ter­day, Mic­ro­soft put out an advi­sory to a secu­rity vul­ne­ra­bi­lity spe­ci­fic to the Win­dows Vista, Win­dows Ser­ver 2008 SP2, and Win­dows 7 RC ope­ra­ting sys­tems.  No other Win­dows ope­ra­ting sys­tems, inc­lu­ding Win­dows 7 RTM are impacted.

Holy cow, once again the older sys­tems (you go XP) are more secure then the new sys­tems.  Why is that you say?  Well this exploit was first found a decade ago.  Yes, you did read that correct, in 1999 this was dis­co­ve­red and patched for the ope­ra­ting sys­tems at the time.  Yet no one thought to put that into the: Newest, Most Secure, Latest and Grea­test ope­ra­ting systems.

So what is this vulnerability?

Accor­ding to Microsoft:

What might an attac­ker use this vul­ne­ra­bi­lity to do?
An attac­ker who suc­cess­fully exploi­ted this vul­ne­ra­bi­lity could take com­plete con­trol of an affec­ted sys­tem. Most attempts to exploit this vul­ne­ra­bi­lity will cause an affec­ted sys­tem to stop res­pon­ding and restart.

I like the last four words, “stop res­pon­ding and res­tart”.  We had an acronym for that back in the day.  BSOD.  But out of all of this, the thing that bothers me the most is Microsoft’s response:

Mic­ro­soft is con­cer­ned that this new report of a vul­ne­ra­bi­lity was not res­pon­sibly disc­lo­sed, poten­tially put­ting com­pu­ter users at risk. We con­ti­nue to encou­rage res­pon­si­ble disc­lo­sure of vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties. We believe the com­monly accep­ted prac­tice of repor­ting vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties directly to a ven­dor ser­ves everyone’s best inte­rests. This prac­tice helps to ensure that cus­to­mers receive com­prehen­sive, high-quality upda­tes for secu­rity vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties without expo­sure to mali­cious attac­kers while the update is being developed.

Mic­ro­soft is con­cer­ned that this new report of a vul­ne­ra­bi­lity was not res­pon­sibly disc­lo­sed? Excuse me what?  It’s not new, it was disc­lo­sed pro­perly the first time.  Why do others become res­pon­si­ble for your oversight?

With that said Mic­ro­soft has issued two do it your­self reso­lu­tions until they can get a patch pushed.

The first is to Disa­ble SMB2 in the registry:

Impact of wor­ka­round. Host will not be able to com­mu­ni­cate using SMB2.

1. Click Start, click Run, type Rege­dit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the follo­wing registry sub­key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services
3. Click Lan­man­Ser­ver.
4. Click Para­me­ters.
5. Right-click to add a new DWORD (32 bit) Value.
6. Enter smb2 in the Name data field, and change the Value data field to 0.
7. Exit.
8. Res­tart the “Ser­ver” ser­vice by per­for­ming one of the following:
   • Open up the com­pu­ter mana­ge­ment MMC, navi­gate to Ser­vi­ces and Appli­ca­tions, click Ser­vi­ces, right-click the Ser­ver ser­vice name and click Res­tart. Ans­wer Yes in the pop-up menu.
   • From a com­mand prompt and with admi­nis­tra­tor pri­vi­le­ges, type net stop ser­ver and then net start ser­ver.

The second is to Block TCP ports 139 and 445 at the firewall:

Impact of Wor­ka­round: Seve­ral Win­dows ser­vi­ces use the affec­ted ports. Bloc­king con­nec­ti­vity to the ports may cause various appli­ca­tions or ser­vi­ces to not func­tion. Some of the appli­ca­tions or ser­vi­ces that could be impac­ted are lis­ted below:

• Appli­ca­tions that use SMB (CIFS)
• Appli­ca­tions that use mails­lots or named pipes (RPC over SMB)
• Ser­ver (File and Print Sharing)
• Group Policy
• Net Logon
• Dis­tri­bu­ted File Sys­tem (DFS)
• Ter­mi­nal Ser­ver Licensing
• Print Spoo­ler
• Com­pu­ter Browser
• Remote Pro­ce­dure Call Locator
• Fax Ser­vice
• Inde­xing Service
• Per­for­mance Logs and Alerts
• Sys­tems Mana­ge­ment Server
• License Log­ging Service

Per­so­nally, I would block those on your inter­net facing fire­wall of you broad­band router.

I Love this utility

One of my favo­rite web­si­tes to look at daily (ok many times a day) is Life Hac­ker.  Today as I was going through some of their archi­ved pos­tings I found this.

A few days ago I tal­ked about a pro­gram called smart ins­ta­ller, but I must say I am over the top impres­sed with life hacker’s ver­sion.  The uti­lity itself is ultra tiny (292k) with an xml file.  The Smart Ins­ta­ller is in excess of 200 megs.  The size dif­fe­rence is due to Smart ins­ta­ller having the ins­ta­llers inc­lu­ded whe­reas life hacker’s ins­ta­ller auto­ma­ti­cally down­loads the latest ver­sion from the net.

Another great fea­ture, to me at least, is that the Life hac­ker Pack has an XML file that you can add or remove appli­ca­tions in.  So if there is an app you like to ins­tall, modify the file in any text edi­tor, get the down­load path, and away you go.  With Smart Ins­ta­ller, you have to hope they add it.

Please don’t get me wrong, Smart ins­ta­ller is very good for a machine that you do not have on the inter­net.  But for size and fle­xi­bi­lity, I will be adding the Life Hac­ker pack to my arse­nal.  You can down­load the pack here. Other users have crea­ted some addi­tio­nal XML files:

PC Res­cue Pack

The PC Res­cue Pack’ll come in real handy in a few weeks at Thanks­gi­ving when Mom and Dad ask you to fix their com­pu­ter. Down­load the Ins­tall­Pad PC Res­cue Pack list, which includes:

• Ad-Aware (mal­ware scan­ner and cleaner)
• CClea­ner (sys­tem optimization)
• Clam­Win (anti-virus)
• Spy­bot Search & Des­troy (spy­ware scan­ner and cleaner)
• Spy­ware Blas­ter (spy­ware prevention)

Media Pack

Oh, you free-loading, Bit­To­rren­ting, DVD-ripping, MP3-sucking, pod­cas­ting, remi­xing, iPod-trading media whiz, you! Down­load the Ins­tall­Pad Media Pack list, which includes:

• Auda­city (sound editor)
• Azu­reus (Bit­To­rrent client)
• Democ­racy (Inter­net TV player)
• iTu­nes (media player)
• Picasa (photo manager)
• Quick­Time (media player)

VLC (media player)

• Do your­self a favor and give it a try

New Computer Security Mistakes

I wan­ted to pass on what I see as some of the top com­pu­ter secu­rity mis­ta­kes that most casual com­pu­ters users make when first set­ting up a new computer:

1. Set­ting an non pro­tec­ted newly ima­ged com­pu­ter on the inter­net.  Before ins­ta­lling any com­pu­ter on the inter­net, you will want to ins­tall at least an anti­vi­rus and make sure that the built in fire­wall for Win­dows is ope­ned.  I per­so­nally have a DVD with a lot of first ins­tall appli­ca­tions on it.  This inc­lu­des Comodo Anti­vi­rus, Comodo Fire­wall, Win­dows XP Ser­vice Pack 3 (Net­work Admin Ins­ta­ller), and Vista Ser­vice Pack 2 (Net­work Admin Ins­ta­ller).  As well as a few other odds and ends.  I run these ins­talls before I ever con­nect my machine to the wire­less net­work.  I know the virus defi­ni­tion files for the Anti­vi­rus will be out­da­ted, but that is correc­ted shortly.
2. Not run­ning upda­tes as soon as online. After ins­ta­lling all the appli­ca­tions men­tio­ned above, I get my sys­tem on the net­work and run upda­tes on my anti­vi­rus soft­ware and then run­ning the Win­dows Update.  This is a very impor­tant step.  Just because an anti­vi­rus is ins­ta­lled or the latest Ser­vice Pack applied, it does not mean you are pro­tec­ted.  With more and more vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties and viru­ses being relea­sed daily, it is a never ending battle to keep your­self pro­tec­ted.  Not only should you worry about the secu­rity soft­ware, but any appli­ca­tion you ins­tall, please run all the updates.
3. Set­ting your pri­mary login ID as an admi­nis­tra­tor.  I know this one is hard, but it has been brought to my atten­tion, and right­fully so, it is not recom­men­ded.  An admi­nis­tra­tor account has unli­mi­ted rights and power on a com­pu­ter.  You can create a sepa­rate user and make is a power user.  For the Admi­nis­tra­tor account, you should rename it from Admi­nis­tra­tor and put a secure pass­word on it.  Also, disa­ble the guest account on your sys­tem for safety measures.

1. Pass­word, Pass­word, Pass­word, and did I men­tion pass­word?  I know this is your home com­pu­ter and you won­der who would get into it.  Well, since the com­pu­ter has become so inte­gra­ted in our lives, we store everything on there.  From bank infor­ma­tion, impor­tant docu­ments, Tax infor­ma­tion, fami­lies infor­ma­tion, on and on.  If your com­pu­ter gets sto­len, someone else now has all of that infor­ma­tion.  If you do not have a secure pass­word (see ear­lier pos­ting) then it’s easy for them to get in.
2. Disk Encryp­tion.This is a topic I will dis­cuss more in depth in the next few days.  There are many free drive encryp­tion appli­ca­tions avai­la­ble that are very very good.  The rea­son for this encryp­tion is so that if someone comes in and just grabs your drive out of your com­pu­ter (less then 3 minu­tes for the most part) your data is secu­red.  See item 4.
3. Wire­less Net­work Secu­rity. Again another topic I will get into later, but for the most part I can sum it up quickly.  If you get a brand new wire­less rou­ter, the defaults are the same.  The same IP address, the same root pass­word, the same SSID (Net­work name).  With this infor­ma­tion anyone in your area can get into your net­work.  There are some things you can do to pro­tect your­self and I plan on dis­cus­sing it later, inc­lu­ding what some recom­men­ded set­tings are.  So please check back.

I hope that you found this use­ful infor­ma­tion.  Ques­tions, com­ments and feed­back is always welcome.