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1) More FireFox Pros And ConsIn the current article on Firefox ( http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160900911 ) my opening argument was "FireFox is a good browser, but not at all the panacea its most ardent fans think it is." My closing argument was "It's great that there are open-source alternatives to try, and it's smart to proactively explore all your options. But go in with your eyes open: All software has flaws. There are no panaceas!" To me, it's hard to imagine less inflammatory statements. I mean: "All software has flaws." How can anyone disagree with that? But the froth-on-the-lips crowd is out in force, claiming I'm shilling for Microsoft, or have my head far up a nether orifice. If members of the rabid pro-Firefox crowd admit to any flaws in that software at all, they say that the numbers of flaws are tiny, and the security holes insignificant. This view, however appealing, is totally false. There is no objective evidence--- zero, zip, nada, nil--- to support that view. Instead, there is a large and growing body of evidence that indeed and of course, there are problems in Mozilla/Firefox, and some of them are quite severe, opening the door to data theft, backdoor infections of your PC, and so on--- exactly the same kinds of problems that Internet Explorer is reviled for! In fact, in addition to the information originally cited in http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160900911 , some new info came out this past weekend, after my article was already written: The folks at Mozilla posted advisories on 9 newly-discovered flaws in Mozilla and its offspring (including FireFox):
Again, these are *exactly* the same types of problems that IE is rightly criticized for. Does all this mean that Firefox is a bad browser? Not at all. It means it's a normal browser, and will require vigilance to use safely. Does this mean that Internet Explorer is wonderful? Not at all. It's a normal browser, and requires vigilance to use safely. If you keep either browser patched, and use the other security tools we discuss here issue after issue, you'll be fine using either IE or Firefox. In point of fact, most of the actual real-life exploits in IE have affected out-of-date, unpatched, and/or unprotected systems. If you keep your software up to date and protected, you'll be fine. Bottom line: Firefox is a fine tool. If you like it, by all means use it. But don't think that using it will automatically make you safe from serious browser security issues--- in fact, cold, hard facts prove exactly the opposite. So, once again: "It's great that there are open-source alternatives to try, and it's smart to proactively explore all your options. But go in with your eyes open: All software has flaws. There are no panaceas!" OK, your turn: What's your FireFox experience been? Or with other Open Source Software? Do you agree that software from Microsoft, Apple, and the Open Source community is roughly equivalent in quality? If not, which is superior, and why is that so? What objective measures can we use to prove or disprove quality assertions? Please read the original article and join the BBS discussion at http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160900911 . See you there! Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- Just pennies per issue! --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 2) Drive Size Issues
All the factors you mention can come into play, Enrique, and we'll discuss them in a moment. But there's one more that has an even larger effect: Drives are sold by "raw" or unformatted capacity. When you partition and format a drive, some of the space on the drive is occupied by the partitioning and formatting data structures. By analogy: think of a filing cabinet. As sold, it can hold a certain number of pages per drawer. But when you add hanging folders, the frames for the folders, index pages, and so on, you actually lose a little space, but can then organize and find your papers more easily. It's the same with hard drives: The partitioning and formatting takes up some space on the drive, but is necessary to organize and find your files. Older drive formats (FAT, FAT16, the early Linux formats, etc), were created in the days when drives were tiny compared to today's. The older formats are not very efficient, and can waste a huge amount of space on a large drive. Those formats also can have severe, built-in limits to the size of the drives or partitions they can "see;" today's drives can simply be beyond the ability of these older formats to handle well. Newer formats (FAT32, ext2, etc.) do better with larger drives; and some formats (NTFS, ext3, ReiserFS, etc.) were specifically designed with very large drives in mind. These latter formats help you to make the most of your disk space, with minimal wastage and no practical limits on disk or partition size. (Yes, there are limits--- e.g. 2 terabytes for NTFS--- but most of us won't reach them anytime soon. <g>) More info on formatting and drive capacity: Next, there are indeed marketing factors, where base10 and base2 numbers get intermingled confusingly. You can even see this confusion in a simple Google definition search on the word "gigabyte:" http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+gigabyte Some of the sites say a gigabyte is "A billion bytes. A thousand megabytes." This is correct in what we might call "casual techspeak," but it is mathematically imprecise. Other sites say "2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes.... one gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes." This is the more precise definition. In fact, a purist would say it's the only "correct" answer. But again, in informal speech, many, many people round off and use the simpler definition. The problem comes when a drive maker labels a drive the casual-speech way, and you're expecting the mathematical way: Then, there'll be a discrepancy of 24MB per GB, which really adds up in the larger drive sizes. (There were even lawsuits about this a couple years back.) So, you have to know how a drive maker defines his terms before you trust the capacity numbers. And then there are the sector-relocation areas. It's not at all unusual for a huge drive to have an uncorrectable manufacturing defect or three somewhere on its surface, so many drives ship with a low-level "remapping" tool that automatically substitutes a good location somewhere else on the disk for the bad location(s). Your software may know nothing of this remapping--- it can address the moved location by its original address, and the drive's firmware handles the translation to the new address. In this way, a few bad sectors don't cost you any net drive space; and your end-user software doesn't waste time trying to correct uncorrectable manufacturing defects (it never even sees the bad sectors). I've never heard of a case where a sector-relocation area significantly affects a drive's total capacity. I suppose it could happen, but I think this is not a likely thing. The first two issues, though--- raw versus formatted capacity, and base10 versus base2--- are *huge* factors affecting how much usable space you end up with on any given drive. You'd think drive size would be simple, wouldn't you? <g> Click to email this item to a
friend 3) Return Of The "Malicious Software Removal Tool"
The "Malicious Software Removal Tool" is actually a mini-anti-malware tool; it only targets a small number of the very worst and most common worms/trojans/viruses going around. But because these malware nasties evolve, so does the tool: Indeed, a new version will be released about once a month, so you'll be seeing this tool again and again. My guess is that you're correct, Ned, in that one of your other tools is seeing the activity of the Microsoft tool as suspicious, (or vice versa); and they're blocking each other, bringing your system to a halt. Now that MS' plans are clear--- there will be an updated "Malicious Software Removal Tool" released about once a month--- the anti-malware vendors can adapt and adjust their tools to avoid stepping on the Microsoft's tool's toes. My guess is that your crashing problem should be short-lived; and will go away after an update to your other anti-malware tools, soon. But if not, see the list of some known-good security tools on page two of this article: http://langa.com/u/9c.htm ; if one doesn't work for you, simply try one of the others! Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 4) "Universal" Disk Imaging?
No, Gavin I hadn't heard of this, it's interesting! The Universal Imaging Utility is designed to work with your existing disk imaging tool (it's not an imaging tool in itself). It acts as a kind of "driver interpreter," letting you move an image from one system to a completely different one: The Universal Imaging Utility makes sure the correct drivers end up on the target machine, no matter where the image originally came from. I'd approach it with caution, as it's trying to get a disk image to do something it's not designed for. And even if it solves the hardware differences, there'll still be software issues with "Product Activation" and such. But with a trial available, and with a full cost of only $19, the Universal Imaging Utility could be worth a careful test if you're interested in moving complete drive images between dissimilar PCs. Click to email this item to a
friend 5) Scheduling Notice; Expanded EditionIt's not exactly Spring Break--- no beer bongs or wet T-shirts here!--- but I will be taking a short break next week. That's why this issue is considerably longer than usual--- something extra to tide you over. <g> I'll be back at the keyboard in a week, on May 2, writing the next newsletter issue which is scheduled to appear the following Monday, May 9th. See you then! Click to email this item to a
friend 6) "NoSpyMail" Pt 1
Do I think this "protection" is useful? No; unfortunately, not even a little. All it's doing is blocking normal web-based operations. Let's take a step back and think of what happens when you open a web page: Your browser sends a request to a distant server asking for a page plus whatever pictures, music, files, etc. may be embedded in the page. The server gathers the requested data and sends it--- where? How does that server know to send the info to *you* out of all the millions of people who are on line? It knows because your original request includes a "return address" as part of the request. If browsers spoke English, you'd hear your browser say something like this to a server every time you click a link or encounter an automatically executing link:
The remote server logs the request, and sends the file/picture/music/whatever to the designated address, in the requested format (if multiple formats are available or required); and the transaction is done. Again, this happens for every single link. In a nutshell, it's how the entire web works! Same goes for HTML email, which is really just a form of web page. If you read any HTML-formatted email that contains any link whatsoever--- pictures, music, files, *anything"--- then by necessity your system must tell a server what you want, where to send it, what format to use, etc; just like the plain-language example above. The server then responds to the request from your system, and sends the picture, music, file, or whatever, that's part of the email. (con't next item) Click to email this item to a
friend 7) "NoSpyMail" and Web Bugs, Pt 2Now, let's look specifically at NoSpyMail. It says "spymail" can reveal:
The first three items deserve a big "so what?" That information is not private or secret or personal; in fact, you've sent out that information on every link you've ever clicked; and for every embedded file, graphic, music clip, and whatnot you've ever downloaded; since the first day you surfed the web. Your browser and HTML email client broadcast that info all the time--- they *must,* so external servers can respond to your requests. Again, this information is not private or secret; and in fact is necessary for the Web to work. Making it seem like it's being stolen from your system is just plain silly. "The date/time when you read a message." Again, big whoop. Servers log all incoming requests as something like "request for [name of object or file] received from [ip number] at [this date and time]." This is how the servers keep track of which IP address asked for what files, graphics, or what not. It's how web servers work, and isn't anything to get worked up about. "Notification that you received the message." See above. "The identity of anyone you forward the message to." I suppose it could happen: If the server knows that a certain unique message was sent to you, and then that same unique message sends a click or retrieval request from someone else, then, by inference, you must have sent the message to that person. But at most all the server will have is a second anonymous IP address; not "the identity of anyone you forward the message." Again, the vendor is playing this up for fright effect. *Any* link you click or that's embedded in an email or web page can serve to send the above kinds of data back to a server, so if it bothers you to reveal things like your IP address, your only real option is to unplug your PC and never go online again. On the other hand, if you want to surf the web, realize that you must--- *must*--- exchange this kind of data with servers in order to receive the files or pages you want to see. The servers aren't "spying" on you when they obtain this data. It's how the web works. What bothers some people is when all the above happens with "web bugs," small, empty graphics embedded in some HTML-based emails to do some of the above. As Brett found, some totally legitimate uses include tracking delivery rates or identifying delivery problems with email--- totally valid, totally above-board, totally harmless. But spammers can use it, too, and that's what freaks out some people, causing them to seek "protection" from this kind of simple data exchange in email. But again: Do I think this "protection" is useful? No; not even a little. You're better off with the suite of valid, useful security tools we've discussed repeatedly here. For example, a good spam-blocking or filtering tool will remove most of the bad email before you ever even see it. That way, nothing in those mails can cause trouble. And if something bad is inside the mail that remains, the rest of the security tools--- the antivirus, anti-malware, etc--- will catch it. In the past, we've also discussed turning off the "preview" function of your email client, as this prevents the automatic opening or activation of embedded objects or links in any emails. This is desirable because you must explicitly open an email before anything can happen with that email. This gives you the ability to manually discard suspect mail, unopened and unread, before anything can be triggered inside. If, after all that, a few "web bugs" make it into the rest of your mail, so what? You won't be revealing any information that you don't already reveal in the course of normal browsing anyway. Talk about a fuss over nothing! If you've read this newsletter for any length of time at all, you know I'm a nut about online security. But some online "threats" are largely imaginary or exaggerated for effect by the purveyors of "security" software. Web bugs are one such item. There are far more important issues to worry about! (More info: "The Web-Bug Boondoggle" http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010621S0030 ) Click to email this item to a
friend 8) Last Full Week To "Recommend And Win"At the end of the month, I'll choose three more monthly
winners who each will get a FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTION to the LangaList Plus!
edition. (If your name is drawn and you're already a Plus! subscriber, your
current subscription will be extended by a full year.) Click to email this item to a
friend 9) Movies Won't Play
This could actually be caused by a number of different problems, ranging from video card issues to problems in Windows itself. Also, competing playback software sometimes destructively interferes with other playback software (eg RealPlayer, Quicktime and Windows Media Player all trying to "own" the same file types...). You may have already tried the basic solutions: Uninstall *all* your movie/video software; and uninstall the drivers and software for any related hardware (eg software/drivers that came with your CD or DVD player; and video card). Reinstall the drivers first, then install ONE (and only one) playback tool, and let it take over whatever files it's designed to. See if you can get things going in that simplified setup. With luck, you'll be all set. If not, as a quick, kludgy workaround, check out the free "VideoLAN" software. It's actually meant as a way to distribute video across a LAN, but it also can serve as a pretty good standalone movie player. I've even used it to resuscitate a DVD drive for which I had no playback software or codecs at all: VideoLan let it work perfectly! See: http://www.videolan.org/ Click to email this item to a
friend 10) Code Load Success StoryAfter his site was listed in a "Load The Code" section, code-loader John Carson wrote:
Do you have a home page or website? (It doesn't matter
what size.) Please click over to
http://langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join the thousands of
LangaList readers who have "Loaded the Code!" (If you've already "Loaded The
Code" and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web
site, please see http://langa.com/link.txt
) Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting At Virtual Forums Strategic Development 4 USA Leask site David Reeves, painter Riverbank Translation, Vibration & Noise Expert fraha's own My forBedin Sight Orange Coast PC User's Group
Equipping the people of Swaziland Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 11) Download Helper Needed
I've been using "Star Downloader" for a while now; it's available in two versions, free and Pro, with the usual kinds of features split. Seems to work pretty well, and integrates with your browser (Mozilla browsers, too!). http://www.stardownloader.com/ Click to email this item to a
friend 12) Just For Grins
Thanks, Bill! Gutenberg.org is pretty cool--- over 15,000 e-versions of literary classics and other works, all in the public domain, converted to electronic format by volunteers! Click to email this item to a
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