2007 August

I get a lot of ”Ask the Geek” emails from people whose computers won’t shut down properly, either hanging up or rebooting endlessly. (Sometimes, nothing at all happens and you have to press and hold the power button.) Rather than trying to answer each question, I figure it’s time I made this tip available.
So, I wrote a [...]

The good folks over at Secunia have a nice, free, web-based tool to scan your computer for certain common vulnerabilities. I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on this before, as I get the Secunia alert newsletter.:
Secunia Software Inspector6 December, 2006 - Secunia is proud to announce the availability of the Secunia Software Inspector. Detect and update [...]

Steve Gibson, author of the best disk recovery and maintenance utility on the planet, Spinrite, developer of the first anti-spyware program, OptOut, and recipient of the People’s Choice Podcast Awards in the Science/Technology category for his Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte of Twit, wrote the first firewall “leak test.” It has been downloaded 6,715,096 [...]

A friend of mine came up to me the other day and said, “I love your computer maxims, but I don’t have anything to worry about–I have all of my passwords stored on an encrypted thumb drive.” Of course, my retort was, “That’s a good thing. Where do you keep your backups?”
“On my external USB [...]

CardSpace (formerly InfoCard) is Microsoft’s new digital identity meta-system that comes with Windows Vista by default. Now, if you have .NET Framework 3.0 on your PC, you have CardSpace; it’s a .NET 3.0 component. But you probably didn’t know that (I didn’t) unless you’re a .NET enthusiast. There was no fanfare about it.
I’m glad to see it, in a [...]

Depending on which vendor you use, may not be as protected as you think. According to this article on the ClamAV website, only three vendors prevailed:
On August 8th at LinuxWorld, network gateway vendor Untangle performed an all-out public test of different anti-virus vendors to see how they really compare.
In an antivirus “fight club” conducted in front [...]

The Zonbu unit is definitely *not* a toy that takes a Geek to set up. This is good news: A consumer can be confident in knowing that if she buys a Zonbu and follows the provided instructions, it’ll work right out of the box. I followed the instructions and it booted right up when connected [...]

Got it today. Unfortunately, I have a blown keyboard that is preventing my Dell and, I presume, the Zonbu unit from booting. (I SO wanted to play with this thing tonight!) Tomorrow, I’m going to give it a run for its money and if it’s everything I think it might be, I’m going viral with [...]

Matt Hartley’s article in Lockergnome’s IT Professionals talks about the Zonbu “green” computer. Well, I’m not so concerned about the green aspect as I am about the security aspect. Zonbu looks like the perfect PC for the computer-illiterate, i.e., the average user. They say it’s immune to most of the bad stuff out there:
There are [...]