Sure, but if you wipe the hard drive you take a bet that the important files that you backed up aren't actually infected with the very virus that you're trying to get rid off. No method is foolproof, but you do at some point have to hope that antivirus software with the latest updates will pick everything up.
I've done it. He means 30 minutes of his work and hours of the computer's work. The approach is:
boot into a known clean state (either use a Linux bootable CD or one of the antivirus programs that comes with a boot disk) and do a complete virus scan and delete (not quarantine) any affected files
reboot disconnected from the network and install a firewall and virus scanner with the latest definitions
use add/remove programs and get rid of all the stupid IE toolbars, P2P clients, humorous cursors and other semi-legitimate malware
use a legitimate anti-spyware to do a scan and remove anything left
use msconf.exe and disable any unnecessary startup items (like soundcard mixers which really aren't necessary)
install all of the latest service packs and updates
I don't use Windows (except in VmWare/Parallels) but I have done the above for a few friends, and it will generally subjectively speed up the machine, often by a huge amount. Another way to get a big speedup is to do a cheap RAM upgrade if they're a bit low.
Yes, although my approach is usually to do a clean install and then use the OS X migration feature to bring the applications and files over. And, I have to say, in my experience so far this works perfectly - every file, every setting, desktop background, application settings, everything. I can walk up to a new Mac, set my MacBook into Firewire target disk mode, and have that Mac as a perfect clone of my MacBook within a couple of hours, no user intervention needed. The advantage of this approach is that it's stepwise - if there is an issue with the new OS, I can go back to the older install on the other disk or partition. If I desperately need to use the machine in the meantime I can abort the transfer and reboot, then set it going again when I'm ready. It totally avoids that panic that things just might go wrong .
What you're saying is interesting, but it is nothing to do with Christianity. Jesus himself said he must die and be resurrected. Paul said that if Jesus was not raised from the dead then his (and by extension the faith of all Christians) is nothing. Believe in Jesus, don't believe in Jesus - that's up to you - but to claim that one can believe in him whilst ignoring the things he said and did is ridiculous.
Interesting, you must be reading a different Codex Sinaiticus to me. From the beginning of the book of Acts, on the direct English translation window of their website:
"The former discourse I made, O Theophilus, concerning all things that Jesus began both to do and to teach, till the day in which he was taken up, after he had, through the Holy Spirit, given commandments to the apostles whom he had chosen: to whom he also showed himself alive, after he had suffered, by many infallible proofs, appearing to them for forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God."
Whether you believe in the resurrection is up to you, but this manuscript makes it clear that the early Church did, at least by about 400 AD.
I think there would always be a way round this. I suspect there would be a clever computational way of benchmarking the rendering engine and then creating images of different sizes on-the-fly in a complex layout and finding out which combinations were rendered. Sounds complex, but with a little thought I think there will always be a workaround.
I thought of another way to defeat your workaround - make the links very different font sizes then read the size of the containing object. I think, ultimately, it would be very difficult to allow any kind of introspection whilst at the same time protecting completely against this vulnerability.
Ooooh, I just re-read your post and see what you mean. Sorry. I still think there could be ways of doing it though, like making the images different sizes and then seeing what size the containing object has become - in fact this would work by using fonts of different sizes. I think once you start trying to prevent this, you pull on one little thread and the whole CSS/DOM thing unravels.
That would make it harder, but not impossible. If you have a background image for each link style, and give that background image a unique (one-time generated) name, then the server would know when that image had been pulled, and hence which links had been visited.
Because that's how this vulnerability works. It doesn't really sniff your browser history - as such - what it does it it has a huge page full of popular websites, displays them as links (invisible) and sees which links change colour. There's no easy workaround that will both allow you to have a history, and allow web pages to display something different (e.g. link colour / style) for pages that you have visited already. Perhaps the best compromise would be to allow changes to link style only within the domain of the page that's attempting to set that style. But it's still a major backward step in usability. The other option might be to disable link styles for pages that have greater than a certain number of links (say 50).
What's interesting to consider is the cost of migrating to OS X. Obviously the hardware is more expensive, but there's virtually no malware issue, and of course MS Office is available so most of the day to day stuff doesn't need any extra training. For small businesses, features such as Time Machine and extras such as MobileMe and 'Back to my Mac' may more than make up for the hardware costs for businesses that would use these features. The 'Genius Bar' people are annoying for techie users, but for most small businesses, the convenience of being able to take your Macbook to the nearest Apple store is great.
Your post might give the reasons why there are more viruses for Windows (although I would dispute your explanation) but the reality is that for whatever reason, Windows has much more of a problem in this area. One of the things that it routinely done in TCO calculations is to factor in the cost of 'retraining' users to use a different OS than Windows and a different office package to MS Office. That retraining is only required because of the MS market share. If it's fair to factor in those costs (which wouldn't be an issue if MS didn't hold a dominant/monopoly position) then it's definitely fair to factor in the virus/malware costs (which you claim are also because of their dominant position).
Yup, and the job of those who oversee and regulate these things is to prevent abuse, so that the same rules that apply when I fill out my tax forms apply to the people that devise the laws that underpin that tax form.
Tethering is available in the UK, but you have to pay a 'bolt-on' fee which is only a penny cheaper than their most expensive pay monthly (=no contract) USB dongle, even though the monthly contract includes 'unlimited internet'. Nice of them to support their loyal customers like that.
I remember my stepdad having a magazine that came with one of those flexible 7" records. We recorded the record onto cassette then loaded the cassette onto our micro. It worked as well, amazingly.
The thing that I've never understood is why more sites that are supposedly 'secure' don't have any mechanism for them to authenticate themselves to me. It would seem to me fairly trivial for users of a website to choose a second password that the website would show to them when they tried to log-on, after some sort of pre-authentication and therefore make it really easy to avoid any phishing attacks.
Well, if you read the article you would see that "the root USB node (IOUSBDevice) still identifies the device as a Palm Pre", therefore it appears that there are checks that could be put into the next version of iTunes to block this. If Apple were a bit smarter, they would make iTunes available for 50 quid for non-iPod devices.
Yup. I was using Debian then Ubuntu for eight years. I switched to OS X last year (finally have a decent salary:) and never looked back. So far, EVERY, and I mean EVERY Ubuntu upgrade has broken on my hardware, usually the fault of ATI, but I'm still sick of having to waste a weekend to sort out all my Ubuntu boxes so that I can get the latest MythTV. I might even go back to Debian+backports...
I don't use any Microsoft OS, I used Debian then Ubuntu for eight years then switched to OS X last year. Seriously, it's so nice to be able to walk into a shop and buy something, plug it into my MacBook and it just works. By support I meant, drivers to support the hardware, not telephone support.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you wiped your hard drive, the only "important files" you would back up would be text files?
Sure, but if you wipe the hard drive you take a bet that the important files that you backed up aren't actually infected with the very virus that you're trying to get rid off. No method is foolproof, but you do at some point have to hope that antivirus software with the latest updates will pick everything up.
I've done it. He means 30 minutes of his work and hours of the computer's work. The approach is:
I don't use Windows (except in VmWare/Parallels) but I have done the above for a few friends, and it will generally subjectively speed up the machine, often by a huge amount. Another way to get a big speedup is to do a cheap RAM upgrade if they're a bit low.
Yes, although my approach is usually to do a clean install and then use the OS X migration feature to bring the applications and files over. And, I have to say, in my experience so far this works perfectly - every file, every setting, desktop background, application settings, everything. I can walk up to a new Mac, set my MacBook into Firewire target disk mode, and have that Mac as a perfect clone of my MacBook within a couple of hours, no user intervention needed. The advantage of this approach is that it's stepwise - if there is an issue with the new OS, I can go back to the older install on the other disk or partition. If I desperately need to use the machine in the meantime I can abort the transfer and reboot, then set it going again when I'm ready. It totally avoids that panic that things just might go wrong .
I always heard the the "ForSure" as sarcastic, like: "plays... oh, for sure *rolls eyes*".
Microsoft aren't exclusively a software company, either.
What you're saying is interesting, but it is nothing to do with Christianity. Jesus himself said he must die and be resurrected. Paul said that if Jesus was not raised from the dead then his (and by extension the faith of all Christians) is nothing. Believe in Jesus, don't believe in Jesus - that's up to you - but to claim that one can believe in him whilst ignoring the things he said and did is ridiculous.
Interesting, you must be reading a different Codex Sinaiticus to me. From the beginning of the book of Acts, on the direct English translation window of their website:
Whether you believe in the resurrection is up to you, but this manuscript makes it clear that the early Church did, at least by about 400 AD.
I think you have been misinformed.
Name me an OS that doesn't have a PDF or PS reader installed by default.
DOS 5
I think there would always be a way round this. I suspect there would be a clever computational way of benchmarking the rendering engine and then creating images of different sizes on-the-fly in a complex layout and finding out which combinations were rendered. Sounds complex, but with a little thought I think there will always be a workaround.
I thought of another way to defeat your workaround - make the links very different font sizes then read the size of the containing object. I think, ultimately, it would be very difficult to allow any kind of introspection whilst at the same time protecting completely against this vulnerability.
Ooooh, I just re-read your post and see what you mean. Sorry. I still think there could be ways of doing it though, like making the images different sizes and then seeing what size the containing object has become - in fact this would work by using fonts of different sizes. I think once you start trying to prevent this, you pull on one little thread and the whole CSS/DOM thing unravels.
That would make it harder, but not impossible. If you have a background image for each link style, and give that background image a unique (one-time generated) name, then the server would know when that image had been pulled, and hence which links had been visited.
Because that's how this vulnerability works. It doesn't really sniff your browser history - as such - what it does it it has a huge page full of popular websites, displays them as links (invisible) and sees which links change colour. There's no easy workaround that will both allow you to have a history, and allow web pages to display something different (e.g. link colour / style) for pages that you have visited already. Perhaps the best compromise would be to allow changes to link style only within the domain of the page that's attempting to set that style. But it's still a major backward step in usability. The other option might be to disable link styles for pages that have greater than a certain number of links (say 50).
What's interesting to consider is the cost of migrating to OS X. Obviously the hardware is more expensive, but there's virtually no malware issue, and of course MS Office is available so most of the day to day stuff doesn't need any extra training. For small businesses, features such as Time Machine and extras such as MobileMe and 'Back to my Mac' may more than make up for the hardware costs for businesses that would use these features. The 'Genius Bar' people are annoying for techie users, but for most small businesses, the convenience of being able to take your Macbook to the nearest Apple store is great.
Your post might give the reasons why there are more viruses for Windows (although I would dispute your explanation) but the reality is that for whatever reason, Windows has much more of a problem in this area. One of the things that it routinely done in TCO calculations is to factor in the cost of 'retraining' users to use a different OS than Windows and a different office package to MS Office. That retraining is only required because of the MS market share. If it's fair to factor in those costs (which wouldn't be an issue if MS didn't hold a dominant/monopoly position) then it's definitely fair to factor in the virus/malware costs (which you claim are also because of their dominant position).
Yup, and the job of those who oversee and regulate these things is to prevent abuse, so that the same rules that apply when I fill out my tax forms apply to the people that devise the laws that underpin that tax form.
Tethering is available in the UK, but you have to pay a 'bolt-on' fee which is only a penny cheaper than their most expensive pay monthly (=no contract) USB dongle, even though the monthly contract includes 'unlimited internet'. Nice of them to support their loyal customers like that.
I've been struggling, really, to read, your sentences, with that many commas.
Sorry, sounds a bit harsh and trollish but someone had to say it and might just save you driving someone mad in the future ;-).
I remember my stepdad having a magazine that came with one of those flexible 7" records. We recorded the record onto cassette then loaded the cassette onto our micro. It worked as well, amazingly.
Yes, that would seem to be the case.
The thing that I've never understood is why more sites that are supposedly 'secure' don't have any mechanism for them to authenticate themselves to me. It would seem to me fairly trivial for users of a website to choose a second password that the website would show to them when they tried to log-on, after some sort of pre-authentication and therefore make it really easy to avoid any phishing attacks.
Well, if you read the article you would see that "the root USB node (IOUSBDevice) still identifies the device as a Palm Pre", therefore it appears that there are checks that could be put into the next version of iTunes to block this. If Apple were a bit smarter, they would make iTunes available for 50 quid for non-iPod devices.
Yup. I was using Debian then Ubuntu for eight years. I switched to OS X last year (finally have a decent salary :) and never looked back. So far, EVERY, and I mean EVERY Ubuntu upgrade has broken on my hardware, usually the fault of ATI, but I'm still sick of having to waste a weekend to sort out all my Ubuntu boxes so that I can get the latest MythTV. I might even go back to Debian+backports...
I don't use any Microsoft OS, I used Debian then Ubuntu for eight years then switched to OS X last year. Seriously, it's so nice to be able to walk into a shop and buy something, plug it into my MacBook and it just works. By support I meant, drivers to support the hardware, not telephone support.