Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
Spread Malware and Scams using Trojan Ad's comes to mind. There's very few companies that do a better job and have the reach than Yahoo does when it comes to this.
The Shareholders are probably wishing they took the Ballmer deal when Microsoft offered them stupid amounts of money for Yahoo.
Second this. Absolutely maintenance free and easy to use if all they want to do is check email, Facebook and the web.
For the Chromebooks, I typically stick with Epson printers since they never seem to change and are well supported. You can pick up an Epson XP-420 usually cheaper than buying ink for a 5 year old printer.
As for the Chromebook, stick with either a big screen notebook or go for a chromebox/chromebase model and use their existing monitor or TV to use it.
Setup Chrome remote desktop so you can remote into it either by invite or on demand.
Also, as with any PC, make sure you install Adblock plus on the Chromebook. People do not understand modern ad's and they will get a scam phone popup or a malicious redirect if you don't. Not that it will do damage to the chromebook, but if you don't want to deal with that call asking if it's real or wanting you to scan the box for a virus that does not exist than Adblock plus is a must.
First off, If there's no reason not to upgrade other than FUD, then they should update. 7 only has a little more than 4 years left and is already in extended support and windows 8/8.1 interface is crap vs 10. If they're worried about being spied on stay with a Local account and don't setup a Microsoft account. It will only take the same telemetry that they've been doing since the customer experience program in vista, which you can then turn off. That being said MS shouldn't have started downloading the OS on PC's without explicit reservations but even that can be disabled.
Easiest method to disable windows 10 from updating is to use the DisableGWX Policy setting. This site's Method 3 will walk you through setting the registry key. Microsoft Also has some other blocking methods as well.
If you just want security patches from that point forward go to windows update settings and uncheck "give me Recommended updates the same way I receive important updates"
This is getting out of hand. Every day I see one of these privacy articles and they all say basically the same thing.
It's reminding me of the Hysteria with Smart Meters. I just got one last week and searching about them online I found tons of sites telling me how it's going to give me Cancer, Hack my Router, Kill my Plants, Keep me up at night and Burn my house down.
I'm actually surprised Mail merge didn't doom OpenOffice/LibreOffice from the start. In office it's roughly a 6 step process to set one up using the mail merge wizard. in LibreOffice, depending on what kind of merge, is at least twice as many steps, with each step much more involved than the office steps. Also it uses LibreOffice's Database, which is fine, but it needs Java, Which I avoid like the plague.
I just wish that LibreOffice would adopt a wizard like system for the more complex features it has with the option to skip the wizard for more power user options. It would make my job a lot easier in the training dept.
Oki Makes some of the most open printers I've seen. Many of their laser printers still support older dot matrix standards (which just about every OS supports) as well as more modern standards like PCL and Postscript. You will pay more for them, but there isn't a printer manufacture out there with more open standards, and their Tech Support in the off chance you have an issue with the printer is second to no one.
If your OS support any Oki at any age, it will print as long as it knows what port to print to, Especially parallel and LAN. Hell, I've used 15 year old Okipage 8C drivers on modern Oki color lasers, Dot Maxtix DOS drivers on Monochrome lasers, Hell, I used an HP 4000 Driver on a Oki B430dn when the 4000 failed at a critical time and they still printed no problem.
I can't vouch for the latest printers, since I haven't touched an Oki since my last job, but Oki was the best decision I made there. We had B430DN's all over the place and they would outlast anything in their price class. We had multiple 430DN's with cycles over 120000 pages with virtually no issues. New aftermarket toner carts were as low as $20 for 5000-7000 imprints. The only issue I had with them was their drum, which had a 20000 Page cycle, and you had to buy an original drum at $150 since the referbs were junk and would grind up at 7000, although the printers new were as low as $130 so we just buy a new printer and you could usually reset the drum in maintenance mode so you could get another 20000-40000 out of it before it would artifact. Even with the drum costs in play at the recommended intervals the cost per page was ridiculously low vs anything in the same price class.
There is a Windows update bug that will cause svchost to eat 1gb of ram everytime it does a Windows update check.
The workaround is to disable automatic updates and update manually, but that's not a good solution. The other fix is to upgrade to 10 in a month, since it doesn't have this bug.
Like I said in the previous article, Proof aside, If Russia or China had access to the file store, they've cracked it by now.
A Large government (with virtually unlimited funding) will crack any commodity encryption scheme. Considering that it's years of your Adversaries Espionage data, It's priceless in the espionage world and spending millions of dollars on a decryption operation would be worth every penny. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that the KGB pulled a Bletchley Park-esque operation to decrypt the files and have been successful.
Apparently, the Mozilla foundation is in money trouble. They're baking ads in the new tab page. They switch to Yahoo cause Google won't pay them anymore. They "partner" with Telefonica to add Hello to Firefox, now they're "partners" with Pocket.
I'm guessing Firefox 39 will add Superfish integration to give me a more personalized web experience and justify it because it's already installed on millions of PC's.
Trains are complex machines. Most of the time, they work flawlessly, but things can go wrong fast. Broken knuckles between Cars. Car Derailments, Cars, (Ignoring the warning signals, Crossing the tracks, getting hit) Tornado, ETC. Youtube them if you don't believe me.
A human in the cockpit is going to assess those situations much faster than an automated system can in many of these situations.
You want to stop trains from speeding? screw the cameras, Put GPS in the engine (if they don't have them already), map the speeds of the rails to the GPS and don't let the train go over the speed limit the GPS (or Dead Reckoning if it's in a tunnel) says you should be going. Its been in Semis for years and it would take next to nothing to modify that system for Train engines with no change to the rail infrastructure.
You have to be Nuts and Stupid to vote for Hillary in 2016. Especially if you're a democrat voting in a primary.
She is easily one of the most corrupt politicians I've seen in recent memory. Hell, just looking at Wikipedia alone gives me these entries and I've probably missed a couple of them:
The last one is the straw breaker. She knowingly hosted her Email on purpose so that she had full control over what people can see or not see regarding federal government correspondence. Her wiping the box when it was under investigation is no different to what Nixon did with the audio tapes and should disqualify her right there.
So basically, all of the names make it look like it's an Adware firm. Awesome.
Is this really news to the security community at this point? I've been saying that Adware is a virus for almost a decade now and they're finally starting to see it?
Does this mean that the AV Firms (MS, Mcafee, Norton, ETC) are finally going to get tough on adware infections? Something tells me no. I'll believe it when Conduit, Dealio, Wajam and the like get flagged my more than 1/2 of the AV Vendors out there.
I've ran into this recently on a Lenovo tablet, but I don't think it was superfish (honestly I don't remember the name, but it was factory installed. ADWCleaner caught it.) although it looks like they purposely obfuscate the name to confuse people so they can't uninstall it.
And this is Adware No. 2 for them. They had their own homebrewed Adware program called Message Center Plus. It was so bad that MSE Detected it.
IBM knew How to make a Laptop. Lenovo Knows how to exploit a Brand Name. it's a good thing Google sold Motorola to them so they can exploit my phone now.
The problem is even the unobtrusive ads are virus filled. Do any search for any major software package (Examples: VLC Media player, 7-Zip, Libreoffice) on any of the major search engines to see what I mean. I get no less then 3 virus infections per week just by people clicking on those types of ads.
It was much better when Google, Bing, and Yahoo put a big colored box around the ads so you can know for certain what your searching for. Google just has the yellow Ad gif now, and yahoo and bing just says "Ads related to" text which just blends into the real search results. I won't even talk about Ask. DuckDuckGo seems to seperate better since it lists official sites but even they just do the Ad gif thing google does.
I'll turn them back on when they clearly label what an ad is so that even an computer idiot can tell they're fake results and they actually screen ad URL's for misleading or malicious content (Not just for malicious scripts and the like. Obviously fake Installer Trojans that you download and execute are bad too), until then, unobtrusive ads stays off.
Now, everybody carries an advanced radio/computer in their pocket, they're sold at RadioShack, and the nerds declare a tragedy.
I think they're declaring a tragedy because you can't build an advanced radio/computer for their pocket out of parts purchased at RadioShack.
There should be Raspberry Pi / Arduino parts all through these stores, They don't take up a lot of floor space and there is interest in these DIY Electronic projects. Instead it might as well be called CellPhoneShack: Full of tons of phones from all carriers priced in a way that they can't beat the carriers' own store prices.
All antivirus sucks, the only difference is how much you pay for it. You give me an PC with any combination of AV product(s) and 15 minutes and I'll give you an infected box, and it won't just be an Adware / Crapware infection. It will be a Screw you type of Cryptovirus or some serious credential stealing backdoor.
That being said, I use MSE / Windows 8 Defender simply because it's free and the least intrusive of the free AV's and it works great as a canary since every Virus attacks MSE / Defender first and you know you're infected when it keels over, giving you time to do something about it before your Files / Backup gets screwed.
Also, Get Adblock plus for your browser, Disable Non Obtrusive ad's in adblock plus so you don't see the Search Engine virus ads and don't download or install anything from anywhere afterwards.
the problem that I have with this isn't this particular patch, but the pattern.
Microsoft over the last 6 months have not had a patch cycle that didn't have major widespread issues with a patch that was eventually recalled. The last time they had problems this bad was sometime around 2002-2003, and back then they claimed that they changed their testing criteria to prevent major patch issues from happening, And it worked for a good while. At least I only had to worry about 1-2 bad patches a year at most.
This patch botch, however, takes the cake. There is absolutely no way this patch should have been able to pass a competent Q/A test. Every single windows 7 machine that got this patch through our test systems (which is about 100 PC's spread across multiple vendors and OS images) popped up a "you are a conterfeit victim" message within 24 hours of receiving the patch. There is no way they couldn't have run into this unless they are doing short term checks for patch related issues.
"The Patch Installed without crashing" is Not Good enough Q/A when you are rolling out a patch to millions of potential customers. Someone in MS Q/A Needs to get fired over these issues before it causes more damage (IE: People taking Forbes stupid advice, disabling critical updates and getting infected by some cryptovirus that wipes out all of their company files that could have been prevented by a patch install.)
Actually, been seeing a lot of ad popups saying to install either flash player or Java recently (hell, even "your machine is infected!! Call this scammer phone number to fix it!" ads have been popping up lately). These have been around forever and AdBlockPlus blocks almost all of them.
The search for "(Insert company here) Support" ads on search engines however adblock plus does nothing for unless you disable unobtrusive ads. I've had people call them and get hosed by some scammer cause their printer wasn't working and they searched for HP Support and got a scammer.
These ads are cases where the 4 Laws of Computer stupidity (See my Sig) are exploited to the fullest and why I block all ads anymore.
But other people have the checkbox set to permit unobtrusive ads.
I don't, and everyone I set up doesn't either, and it isn't because I hate all Ads. It's because I hate Removing Adware and viruses.
All of the unobtrusive ad's I've seen from adblock plus contain some link to a malicious download. Don't believe me? do the VLC Test.
1) Turn on Unobtrusive ads 2) Go to Google (or Bing, or Yahoo, Or Ask, ETC.) 3) Search for "VLC Media Player" (As a side note, DuckDuckGo is the few Search engines that do this right, but still serves malicious ads once in awile. Use "Libreoffice" or "Openoffice" Instead of VLC for an example) 4) Click on the first link you see. If the first link you see is an ad, click on it. 5) Download the installer ***WARNING!! Do not run it unless you Enjoy Cleaning viruses for fun!*** 6) Go to virustotal.com, and submit the file for analysis 7) Watch the detections go off the charts.
I get roughly 3-7 pc's a week in our shop infected by adware caused by malicious ads that would be otherwise considered unobtrusive. If ad firms would clean up their act, and refuse malicious content ads or obvious scams then I would be more receptive of turning it on. Until then They're no different than a trojan downloader to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
Spread Malware and Scams using Trojan Ad's comes to mind. There's very few companies that do a better job and have the reach than Yahoo does when it comes to this.
The Shareholders are probably wishing they took the Ballmer deal when Microsoft offered them stupid amounts of money for Yahoo.
Second this. Absolutely maintenance free and easy to use if all they want to do is check email, Facebook and the web.
For the Chromebooks, I typically stick with Epson printers since they never seem to change and are well supported. You can pick up an Epson XP-420 usually cheaper than buying ink for a 5 year old printer.
As for the Chromebook, stick with either a big screen notebook or go for a chromebox/chromebase model and use their existing monitor or TV to use it.
Setup Chrome remote desktop so you can remote into it either by invite or on demand.
Also, as with any PC, make sure you install Adblock plus on the Chromebook. People do not understand modern ad's and they will get a scam phone popup or a malicious redirect if you don't. Not that it will do damage to the chromebook, but if you don't want to deal with that call asking if it's real or wanting you to scan the box for a virus that does not exist than Adblock plus is a must.
First off, If there's no reason not to upgrade other than FUD, then they should update. 7 only has a little more than 4 years left and is already in extended support and windows 8/8.1 interface is crap vs 10. If they're worried about being spied on stay with a Local account and don't setup a Microsoft account. It will only take the same telemetry that they've been doing since the customer experience program in vista, which you can then turn off. That being said MS shouldn't have started downloading the OS on PC's without explicit reservations but even that can be disabled.
Easiest method to disable windows 10 from updating is to use the DisableGWX Policy setting. This site's Method 3 will walk you through setting the registry key. Microsoft Also has some other blocking methods as well.
If you just want security patches from that point forward go to windows update settings and uncheck "give me Recommended updates the same way I receive important updates"
Their PC line also tends to have Pokki Installed, which screws with windows 10 installs and loves to drop adware every time it updates.
So. More ask Toolbar disguised as AVG Secure search...
This is getting out of hand. Every day I see one of these privacy articles and they all say basically the same thing.
It's reminding me of the Hysteria with Smart Meters. I just got one last week and searching about them online I found tons of sites telling me how it's going to give me Cancer, Hack my Router, Kill my Plants, Keep me up at night and Burn my house down.
I guess I'll have to make another story counter like the one I had to make for the Firefox .NET Plugin but i'm afraid i'll have 30 articles in it by the end of this month at this rate.
I'm actually surprised Mail merge didn't doom OpenOffice/LibreOffice from the start. In office it's roughly a 6 step process to set one up using the mail merge wizard. in LibreOffice, depending on what kind of merge, is at least twice as many steps, with each step much more involved than the office steps. Also it uses LibreOffice's Database, which is fine, but it needs Java, Which I avoid like the plague.
I just wish that LibreOffice would adopt a wizard like system for the more complex features it has with the option to skip the wizard for more power user options. It would make my job a lot easier in the training dept.
Oki Makes some of the most open printers I've seen. Many of their laser printers still support older dot matrix standards (which just about every OS supports) as well as more modern standards like PCL and Postscript. You will pay more for them, but there isn't a printer manufacture out there with more open standards, and their Tech Support in the off chance you have an issue with the printer is second to no one.
If your OS support any Oki at any age, it will print as long as it knows what port to print to, Especially parallel and LAN. Hell, I've used 15 year old Okipage 8C drivers on modern Oki color lasers, Dot Maxtix DOS drivers on Monochrome lasers, Hell, I used an HP 4000 Driver on a Oki B430dn when the 4000 failed at a critical time and they still printed no problem.
I can't vouch for the latest printers, since I haven't touched an Oki since my last job, but Oki was the best decision I made there. We had B430DN's all over the place and they would outlast anything in their price class. We had multiple 430DN's with cycles over 120000 pages with virtually no issues. New aftermarket toner carts were as low as $20 for 5000-7000 imprints. The only issue I had with them was their drum, which had a 20000 Page cycle, and you had to buy an original drum at $150 since the referbs were junk and would grind up at 7000, although the printers new were as low as $130 so we just buy a new printer and you could usually reset the drum in maintenance mode so you could get another 20000-40000 out of it before it would artifact. Even with the drum costs in play at the recommended intervals the cost per page was ridiculously low vs anything in the same price class.
There is a Windows update bug that will cause svchost to eat 1gb of ram everytime it does a Windows update check.
The workaround is to disable automatic updates and update manually, but that's not a good solution. The other fix is to upgrade to 10 in a month, since it doesn't have this bug.
Like I said in the previous article, Proof aside, If Russia or China had access to the file store, they've cracked it by now.
A Large government (with virtually unlimited funding) will crack any commodity encryption scheme. Considering that it's years of your Adversaries Espionage data, It's priceless in the espionage world and spending millions of dollars on a decryption operation would be worth every penny. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that the KGB pulled a Bletchley Park-esque operation to decrypt the files and have been successful.
Proof aside, If Russia or China had access to the file store, they've cracked it by now.
A government (with virtually unlimited funding) will crack any commodity encryption scheme.
Ask Toolbar is no Longer bundled with Java.
It's Bundled with Yahoo now.
Not sure if McAfee Security Scan is still in the mix.
Doubtful. They don't pay enough.
Apparently, the Mozilla foundation is in money trouble. They're baking ads in the new tab page. They switch to Yahoo cause Google won't pay them anymore. They "partner" with Telefonica to add Hello to Firefox, now they're "partners" with Pocket.
I'm guessing Firefox 39 will add Superfish integration to give me a more personalized web experience and justify it because it's already installed on millions of PC's.
Trains are complex machines. Most of the time, they work flawlessly, but things can go wrong fast. Broken knuckles between Cars. Car Derailments, Cars, (Ignoring the warning signals, Crossing the tracks, getting hit) Tornado, ETC. Youtube them if you don't believe me.
A human in the cockpit is going to assess those situations much faster than an automated system can in many of these situations.
You want to stop trains from speeding? screw the cameras, Put GPS in the engine (if they don't have them already), map the speeds of the rails to the GPS and don't let the train go over the speed limit the GPS (or Dead Reckoning if it's in a tunnel) says you should be going. Its been in Semis for years and it would take next to nothing to modify that system for Train engines with no change to the rail infrastructure.
1) greenlight scam game for $5
2) have all bots buy scam game to recoup costs.
They will still lose money, but it will be far less than $5
Totally Agree here.
You have to be Nuts and Stupid to vote for Hillary in 2016. Especially if you're a democrat voting in a primary.
She is easily one of the most corrupt politicians I've seen in recent memory. Hell, just looking at Wikipedia alone gives me these entries and I've probably missed a couple of them:
Whitewater Controversy
FBI Files Controversy
Travel Office Controversy
Cattle Futures Controversy
Email Server Controversy
The last one is the straw breaker. She knowingly hosted her Email on purpose so that she had full control over what people can see or not see regarding federal government correspondence. Her wiping the box when it was under investigation is no different to what Nixon did with the audio tapes and should disqualify her right there.
There are better presidential candidates out there. Hell, there are better potential democrat candidates out there.
So basically, all of the names make it look like it's an Adware firm. Awesome.
Is this really news to the security community at this point? I've been saying that Adware is a virus for almost a decade now and they're finally starting to see it?
Does this mean that the AV Firms (MS, Mcafee, Norton, ETC) are finally going to get tough on adware infections? Something tells me no. I'll believe it when Conduit, Dealio, Wajam and the like get flagged my more than 1/2 of the AV Vendors out there.
I've ran into this recently on a Lenovo tablet, but I don't think it was superfish (honestly I don't remember the name, but it was factory installed. ADWCleaner caught it.) although it looks like they purposely obfuscate the name to confuse people so they can't uninstall it.
And this is Adware No. 2 for them. They had their own homebrewed Adware program called Message Center Plus. It was so bad that MSE Detected it.
IBM knew How to make a Laptop. Lenovo Knows how to exploit a Brand Name. it's a good thing Google sold Motorola to them so they can exploit my phone now.
The problem is even the unobtrusive ads are virus filled. Do any search for any major software package (Examples: VLC Media player, 7-Zip, Libreoffice) on any of the major search engines to see what I mean. I get no less then 3 virus infections per week just by people clicking on those types of ads.
It was much better when Google, Bing, and Yahoo put a big colored box around the ads so you can know for certain what your searching for. Google just has the yellow Ad gif now, and yahoo and bing just says "Ads related to" text which just blends into the real search results. I won't even talk about Ask. DuckDuckGo seems to seperate better since it lists official sites but even they just do the Ad gif thing google does.
I'll turn them back on when they clearly label what an ad is so that even an computer idiot can tell they're fake results and they actually screen ad URL's for misleading or malicious content (Not just for malicious scripts and the like. Obviously fake Installer Trojans that you download and execute are bad too), until then, unobtrusive ads stays off.
Now, everybody carries an advanced radio/computer in their pocket, they're sold at RadioShack, and the nerds declare a tragedy.
I think they're declaring a tragedy because you can't build an advanced radio/computer for their pocket out of parts purchased at RadioShack.
There should be Raspberry Pi / Arduino parts all through these stores, They don't take up a lot of floor space and there is interest in these DIY Electronic projects. Instead it might as well be called CellPhoneShack: Full of tons of phones from all carriers priced in a way that they can't beat the carriers' own store prices.
All antivirus sucks, the only difference is how much you pay for it. You give me an PC with any combination of AV product(s) and 15 minutes and I'll give you an infected box, and it won't just be an Adware / Crapware infection. It will be a Screw you type of Cryptovirus or some serious credential stealing backdoor.
That being said, I use MSE / Windows 8 Defender simply because it's free and the least intrusive of the free AV's and it works great as a canary since every Virus attacks MSE / Defender first and you know you're infected when it keels over, giving you time to do something about it before your Files / Backup gets screwed.
Also, Get Adblock plus for your browser, Disable Non Obtrusive ad's in adblock plus so you don't see the Search Engine virus ads and don't download or install anything from anywhere afterwards.
I'm sure the DPRK isn't too happy about this Series.
the problem that I have with this isn't this particular patch, but the pattern.
Microsoft over the last 6 months have not had a patch cycle that didn't have major widespread issues with a patch that was eventually recalled. The last time they had problems this bad was sometime around 2002-2003, and back then they claimed that they changed their testing criteria to prevent major patch issues from happening, And it worked for a good while. At least I only had to worry about 1-2 bad patches a year at most.
This patch botch, however, takes the cake. There is absolutely no way this patch should have been able to pass a competent Q/A test. Every single windows 7 machine that got this patch through our test systems (which is about 100 PC's spread across multiple vendors and OS images) popped up a "you are a conterfeit victim" message within 24 hours of receiving the patch. There is no way they couldn't have run into this unless they are doing short term checks for patch related issues.
"The Patch Installed without crashing" is Not Good enough Q/A when you are rolling out a patch to millions of potential customers. Someone in MS Q/A Needs to get fired over these issues before it causes more damage (IE: People taking Forbes stupid advice, disabling critical updates and getting infected by some cryptovirus that wipes out all of their company files that could have been prevented by a patch install.)
Actually, been seeing a lot of ad popups saying to install either flash player or Java recently (hell, even "your machine is infected!! Call this scammer phone number to fix it!" ads have been popping up lately). These have been around forever and AdBlockPlus blocks almost all of them.
The search for "(Insert company here) Support" ads on search engines however adblock plus does nothing for unless you disable unobtrusive ads. I've had people call them and get hosed by some scammer cause their printer wasn't working and they searched for HP Support and got a scammer.
These ads are cases where the 4 Laws of Computer stupidity (See my Sig) are exploited to the fullest and why I block all ads anymore.
But other people have the checkbox set to permit unobtrusive ads.
I don't, and everyone I set up doesn't either, and it isn't because I hate all Ads. It's because I hate Removing Adware and viruses.
All of the unobtrusive ad's I've seen from adblock plus contain some link to a malicious download. Don't believe me? do the VLC Test.
1) Turn on Unobtrusive ads
2) Go to Google (or Bing, or Yahoo, Or Ask, ETC.)
3) Search for "VLC Media Player" (As a side note, DuckDuckGo is the few Search engines that do this right, but still serves malicious ads once in awile. Use "Libreoffice" or "Openoffice" Instead of VLC for an example)
4) Click on the first link you see. If the first link you see is an ad, click on it.
5) Download the installer ***WARNING!! Do not run it unless you Enjoy Cleaning viruses for fun!***
6) Go to virustotal.com, and submit the file for analysis
7) Watch the detections go off the charts.
I get roughly 3-7 pc's a week in our shop infected by adware caused by malicious ads that would be otherwise considered unobtrusive. If ad firms would clean up their act, and refuse malicious content ads or obvious scams then I would be more receptive of turning it on. Until then They're no different than a trojan downloader to me.