I would also look to Powershell to solve his issue.
Before Powershell, I would have went with VB Script.
Because he was wanting a bit more of a GUI, HTA (HTML Application) would be a simple option. It is a local web page named.hta instead of.html and it runs with application security on the local computer. Any script you can put in a.vbs file, you can also put into a script block of a.hta. This is one of those little tricks that not to many people know about.
I use hta when I want to keep the flexibility of html/script as an alternative to a compiled vb.net app.
HULU and NetFlix (on the Wii) have replaced my Dish. I went from $60 a month to $8.95 a month.
There were only a hand full of shows that I could not find and this opened me up to a whole lot of shows that I never would have watched before. I took some of that monthly savings and ran connections from my computer to the TV so I can watch HULU on it. Instead of flipping the channel over and over, I end up finding shows that I want to watch and I get more out of them. Sometime entire series are available so you can go back and start from the first episode of the first series. Most of the shows I did watch before were on the DVR. So all I really did was change the interface.
I should have made this change a long time ago. It is only a matter of time before we see a generation that skips cable and dish for TV entertainment. Just like my generation skipped land lines and only got cell phones.
It is no longer a question of if your card will get stolen, but when will it get stolen.
I keep my daily limit low on my debit card. Around $250-$300 is my daily max. When I want to purchase something over that I call the number on the back of the card and have it raised. After the purchase, I call back and lower it again. The few times I need to make that call are worth it.
Once I was calling back to get it lowered and the lady was so confused as to why anyone would want such a low daily limit. Once I explained it to her, she thought it was a good idea.
I use this card every day. So if someone runs it to its max, I will find out about at lunch time. If I am out that 300, its a manageable loss.
What if you could get back every dollar that they take from your account from the bank (or some type of insurance)? Lets just say you have a high daily limit and they are able clean out your account in 1-4 days. How long can you survive while you wait to get it back. Thats the scariest thing about it comming directly out of your account. It is money you are missing while you try to get it recovered. When it is on a normal credit card, you can still make your house payment. There is no way they could get that back to you over night. It would take days or months while they investigate.
The most common theft of credit card numbers are from family members or someone you know. When charges are local to you, the investigations require more time and take more work.
I don't know about the proprietary laptops comment. I guess I don't care if its a proprietary laptop or not, but they should be standardized.
It would be a total mess is they didn't keep some control of the computers and hardware. All the hardware should be the same. This makes it so much easier for the IT department when every single laptop is the same model number. This makes replacements easy. If its hardware, swap the hard drive into a spare unit and everything works. All the drivers are the same. If its a reinstall, its just 5-10 min to load from a standard ghost image. I know you can get driver packs for those images, but its so nice when you know the few drivers you need.
Thats also where deep freeze comes in. Keeps the computer clean from user mistakes. We tried deep freeze and it didn't work for us, but I love the idea behind it.
All they want are honest numbers. We know we cannot trust MPAA/RIAA for those.
I'm not saying we can trust the numbers or have any idea how ISP's will use the results. But they will be more informed when they decided to support or fight ACTA.
My point was more how hard this will be to track down because it is so rare. A mistake that kills one person is too many. when you have 99.999% of them working correctly all the common and normal test cases have passed. How many software products get released and never have a bug or problem?
I'm not trying to justify the failure, but somethings are near impossible to track down.
I have a factory radio in my car that I purchased in 2003 that has locked up 4 times. By lock up, the radio sounded fine but non of the controls responded. I could spin the volume full circle, I could try and eject the disk, I could press the power button. I had to turn the car all the way off to get it back. My car has a handy feature of keeping power to the console and windows for a few secs after turning the car off, so if I turned the car back on before that time then it would still be stuck.
I tried everything I could to reproduce it and I even got it into a dealership with the radio stuck and they had no clue. An intermittent radio lock is much better than a gas pedal lock up.
it is a button on a network cord that when you press it the cord stops working. If he is working on another machine and it keeps giving him network errors, he will figure out another way.
One thing I do is leave the site alone for a day so when I report it, I can tell them it was the last visit to the site. A detail like that helps when looking at logs. The hostname gives them where your located so if the add network uses locations to send adds, this will help.
part of the problem is that these sites will take real adds for real services and have them link to the real site. This helps them pass, then they push out a redirect script later or built in with a trigger to cause the redirection.
Its not often they can or take the time to track it down. But it sure feels good when they tell you they tracked it down because of your help.
We are rolling out Windows 7 where we are now. One of the smoothest OS roll outs I have ever done. Our largest problem was user training. These users had all the shortcuts they ever needed on the desktop before. With a new computer they had to make those shortcuts again and they forgot basic windows stuff. We had to show people the start menu and how to get to network drives (that were already mapped). I will never get these users over to Linux.
Others that had Windows 7 (or Vista) at home picked it up and ran with it. No training required when they teach themselves. That is huge for any company.
Our migration is a slow roll out. It is going so smooth that any problems we have with XP machines that are not quick config changes, we just replace them with a Windows 7 computer. I'm not saying that a Linux deployment would not be that smooth, but I don't know how to do it. I do a lot of things with Group Policy for Windows 7 easily that I would not know how to do in Linux. For that same reason we do not support Mac.
Digital Imaging support was our big question in moving forward with Windows 7. I expect the same considerations would be in place if Linux was on the table. Digital X-Ray is the big thing now where I am. We have a huge variety of digital scan units and sensors and readers that all support Windows. Some of these units are portable so every clinic machine needs to support them. Clinic software is the other limiting factor. I expect there are some talented Linux pros that can pull this off even with out vendor support, but in some cases you have to have that support.
In some cases there are contract or legal or cost reasons. We have one system for email that someone paid way too much for and we are stuck with it because of it. That is one part of our infrastructure we don't control. We hate that we can't change is but we love that we don't have to manage it.
And it is very nice to have a consistent environment. All of our computers are from one manufacturer and we buy batches of the same model number when we can. We know our Windows 7 computer image will work with every computer and only have to update the image with new drives when we add a new model number (and only then if the drivers change).
Every situation is different in every company. A friend looking for an IT job saw one posting that he had to share with me. One requirement was to be able to implement the technology they use and not question it. Sometimes the part about being a good employee is doing what you are told.
You are either: 1) Aware of the security risk on the internet so you disabled javascript 2) You suffer from Paranoid Schizophrenia and don't want them controlling things 3) You have a serious aversion to adds
So the adds they should show you would go something like this in a jpg or animated gif (that is not a standard banner size).
Do you want that extra protection that you just can't get on your own? You need more information on how addvertisements and security threats work. Fallow this link to make sure you are informed. They are still watching you.
Sometimes they don't have to track you to figure out your habits
There is so much more COFEE should have done. It looks like it takes a look at your current running state. It grabs netwrok connections you have open, running processes, and user account names that are logged in. Things that get lost when you power a computer off. The autorun is just to make it simple for the user. I don't expect this is the only tool ran. I expect it is quick snapshot before you pull the plug.
Microsoft did take care to get the correct versions of the tools for each OS. You know how you can take some utils from XP and run on 2000 or Windows 7. This collection of tools looked like they should be able to run on any version. But for whatever reason they had a version of netstat for every Microsoft OS. My only reasoning for them to do it is for how it would stand up in the court room. It could be argued that using the XP version on the vista machine could have given invalid results because it was not ment to be ran on vista.
I have not looked at DECAF yet. But a simple root kit is all you need to defend this off. Hide running processes and network connections. Or better yet, stop breaking the law.
Develop an online presence is the best thing you can do. There are so many ways to do it too.
1) Start a blog. It can be about anything. It works best if you focus in on a topic.
2) Join a online community. If you blog about something, find others that cover the same topic and contribute comments. Find forums that cover things you are interested in and get involved. Ask some questions and later respond to other new people when you know the topic better. Post valid comments on slashdot or any other site like this.
3) Make something and share it. Write a macro, script, addon, program, or wallpaper and released it. contribute to open source projects, even it its just tracking down bugs. These create a conversation online and content that others will talk about or repeat.
4) Post your hard to find questions in newsgroups. These get mirriored all the time.
5) Link back to yourself when ever you can. If you have a signature, link back to your blog or project. Don't over do it.
We have one software package that we have tried to phase out for several years. We do not support it, but a hand full of users still demand it. We do not have the power to not let them have it. We tried, but it is out of our hands.
We replaced a system that was central to the business we do 4 years ago. There were at most 5 options to choose from, only 2 were realistic options, and none of them ran on Linux or were OSS. The vender did give us a choice on database backend though. Pick SQL or ORACLE. The option we passed on did not give us that option.
In one area we do lots of specialized digital imaging. We use several different venders for different items and Linux support is not a feature they provide. In one case we cannot even get the software they provide to integrate into our central image store.
We have another software package that is central to another department that integrates features of office into and require office to be on the system. This is one such system where the users picked the features that they wanted and we picked from the limited selection of available software.
The IT we have are under staffed and over extended. There is a cost to retraining people to new products. There is a cost to replacing an existing product with something new. There is a cost to the amount of new help IT would have to provide. While you transition from one product to another, you have to support and know both. In most of these examples the product may be free but the time to do it has a huge price. More so when it currently works, users already know it, and you have bigger issues to deal with.
It may not be that simple for us to switch, I do think Microsoft recently created a window for others to make the jump. Office 2007 was a major change from 2003. The UI is so different, that it requires retraining of staff and a few days of lost productivity to make the change. Why not go open office, you have to retrain either way. Vista did the same thing. People that are on XP should be looking at OSX or Linux as an option to Windows 7. You already have to reinstall, get new drivers, get updated software. For the average user, it will make little difference what OS they are running. I can search the web and check my email from any one of them just as easy.
For as much as I would love to make the jump, I have nothing driving me to do it and only resistance preventing me from doing it.
I guess I did not know there was an option not to use the internal servers.
Our unit has its own domain and dns servers. The zone does get replicated to the central dns servers, but we have to use the Fully Qualified Domain Name of our servers when on computers outside our unit.
Have the users try the full name of the server and see if that helps.
I used to work in a cotton factory. its possible that cotton from that factory ended up to tbe the cotton they used. did you hear about that case where a woman's dna....
I may have missed something. But if its seasonal, why create a new feed for each event?
Why not reuse the same feed over and over again each year? If you are getting alot of old requests, its possible that one of your old feeds is featured someplace or getting good search results. (not to mention all the old subscribers that already had it). Everyone that was involved in the old event would automaticly get the new content.
One interesting aspect of trying to make a game fair and balance is that rewards for beating content in large groups is left up to the groups to hand out.
In world of warcraft you have 10 to 25 people killing bosses that give 3-4 rewards and they have to decide on a way to handle it. In theory enough items should drop over time that everyone will get the items they need. But people fight to get the best items and over time that becomes the items that everyone wants.
Players have designed many systems of handing out loot based on various thing that they define as fair. That depends on leasdership and what their view of fair is. What is fair to the person that has been there for 2 years vs 2 months vs first time vs part time vs that one person you must have to do anything is very different. The experiences they have in real life or in game also impact that.
Every system has its advantages and problems. Do the people that need it just random for it, do the officers decide, do you hand out points for stuff and use them to "buy" the items with, or do you just take turns. You need leadership you can trust more then anything else to make any system work. Statistacly over time peaple tend to go for the same items and all a loot system does is change the order within the group that you get those items.
The thing is most games give the users no direction. This is good because it lets good leaders set up and run good systems that fit the group. But its also bad where people that should not be trusted are running it. Or in general where people have those differing oppinions of what is fair or what items they deserve will cause drama if left unchecked.
In my guild I use a solid system that fits our group. I don't have to step in and make jugement calls (calls that could be questioned) becuase the rules make those calls for me. I spent alot of time making those calls ahead of time when writting the rules. It keeps me and other officers on the same page and consistant. And everyone else knows what to expect every time a possible situation comes up.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect that the people behind the DOS Attacks break other crimes where there is already a lot of case law supporting it.
I would also look to Powershell to solve his issue.
Before Powershell, I would have went with VB Script.
Because he was wanting a bit more of a GUI, HTA (HTML Application) would be a simple option. It is a local web page named .hta instead of .html and it runs with application security on the local computer. Any script you can put in a .vbs file, you can also put into a script block of a .hta. This is one of those little tricks that not to many people know about.
I use hta when I want to keep the flexibility of html/script as an alternative to a compiled vb.net app.
HULU and NetFlix (on the Wii) have replaced my Dish. I went from $60 a month to $8.95 a month.
There were only a hand full of shows that I could not find and this opened me up to a whole lot of shows that I never would have watched before. I took some of that monthly savings and ran connections from my computer to the TV so I can watch HULU on it. Instead of flipping the channel over and over, I end up finding shows that I want to watch and I get more out of them. Sometime entire series are available so you can go back and start from the first episode of the first series. Most of the shows I did watch before were on the DVR. So all I really did was change the interface.
I should have made this change a long time ago. It is only a matter of time before we see a generation that skips cable and dish for TV entertainment. Just like my generation skipped land lines and only got cell phones.
It is no longer a question of if your card will get stolen, but when will it get stolen.
I keep my daily limit low on my debit card. Around $250-$300 is my daily max. When I want to purchase something over that I call the number on the back of the card and have it raised. After the purchase, I call back and lower it again. The few times I need to make that call are worth it.
Once I was calling back to get it lowered and the lady was so confused as to why anyone would want such a low daily limit. Once I explained it to her, she thought it was a good idea.
I use this card every day. So if someone runs it to its max, I will find out about at lunch time. If I am out that 300, its a manageable loss.
What if you could get back every dollar that they take from your account from the bank (or some type of insurance)? Lets just say you have a high daily limit and they are able clean out your account in 1-4 days. How long can you survive while you wait to get it back. Thats the scariest thing about it comming directly out of your account. It is money you are missing while you try to get it recovered. When it is on a normal credit card, you can still make your house payment. There is no way they could get that back to you over night. It would take days or months while they investigate.
The most common theft of credit card numbers are from family members or someone you know. When charges are local to you, the investigations require more time and take more work.
I don't know about the proprietary laptops comment. I guess I don't care if its a proprietary laptop or not, but they should be standardized.
It would be a total mess is they didn't keep some control of the computers and hardware. All the hardware should be the same. This makes it so much easier for the IT department when every single laptop is the same model number. This makes replacements easy. If its hardware, swap the hard drive into a spare unit and everything works. All the drivers are the same. If its a reinstall, its just 5-10 min to load from a standard ghost image. I know you can get driver packs for those images, but its so nice when you know the few drivers you need.
Thats also where deep freeze comes in. Keeps the computer clean from user mistakes. We tried deep freeze and it didn't work for us, but I love the idea behind it.
All they want are honest numbers. We know we cannot trust MPAA/RIAA for those.
I'm not saying we can trust the numbers or have any idea how ISP's will use the results. But they will be more informed when they decided to support or fight ACTA.
My point was more how hard this will be to track down because it is so rare. A mistake that kills one person is too many. when you have 99.999% of them working correctly all the common and normal test cases have passed. How many software products get released and never have a bug or problem?
I'm not trying to justify the failure, but somethings are near impossible to track down.
I have a factory radio in my car that I purchased in 2003 that has locked up 4 times. By lock up, the radio sounded fine but non of the controls responded. I could spin the volume full circle, I could try and eject the disk, I could press the power button. I had to turn the car all the way off to get it back. My car has a handy feature of keeping power to the console and windows for a few secs after turning the car off, so if I turned the car back on before that time then it would still be stuck.
I tried everything I could to reproduce it and I even got it into a dealership with the radio stuck and they had no clue. An intermittent radio lock is much better than a gas pedal lock up.
Just stating the obvious. But this enforces it even more.
Less than 100 cars out of 8,000,000 have had this problem. That is a 0.001% failure rate.
Of those 0.001% of cars that had the problem, how many times did someone drive them before they failed?
I don't want to say this is user error, but I have seen some users do stupid stuff and not even know they did it.
I wonder how much add revenue they generated from all those impressions?
does testing on production increase your page views?
Give a few people lag switches.
http://images.google.com/images?q=lag+switch
it is a button on a network cord that when you press it the cord stops working. If he is working on another machine and it keeps giving him network errors, he will figure out another way.
If someone has physical access to your machine, then you have already lost.
I have helped a few sites track down and remove scareware. give them as many details as you can.
My host name and IP from http://www.displaymyhostname.com/
The time I was on the page. What page you were on.
One thing I do is leave the site alone for a day so when I report it, I can tell them it was the last visit to the site. A detail like that helps when looking at logs. The hostname gives them where your located so if the add network uses locations to send adds, this will help.
part of the problem is that these sites will take real adds for real services and have them link to the real site. This helps them pass, then they push out a redirect script later or built in with a trigger to cause the redirection.
Its not often they can or take the time to track it down. But it sure feels good when they tell you they tracked it down because of your help.
Many other factors come into play.
We are rolling out Windows 7 where we are now. One of the smoothest OS roll outs I have ever done. Our largest problem was user training. These users had all the shortcuts they ever needed on the desktop before. With a new computer they had to make those shortcuts again and they forgot basic windows stuff. We had to show people the start menu and how to get to network drives (that were already mapped). I will never get these users over to Linux.
Others that had Windows 7 (or Vista) at home picked it up and ran with it. No training required when they teach themselves. That is huge for any company.
Our migration is a slow roll out. It is going so smooth that any problems we have with XP machines that are not quick config changes, we just replace them with a Windows 7 computer. I'm not saying that a Linux deployment would not be that smooth, but I don't know how to do it. I do a lot of things with Group Policy for Windows 7 easily that I would not know how to do in Linux. For that same reason we do not support Mac.
Digital Imaging support was our big question in moving forward with Windows 7. I expect the same considerations would be in place if Linux was on the table. Digital X-Ray is the big thing now where I am. We have a huge variety of digital scan units and sensors and readers that all support Windows. Some of these units are portable so every clinic machine needs to support them. Clinic software is the other limiting factor. I expect there are some talented Linux pros that can pull this off even with out vendor support, but in some cases you have to have that support.
In some cases there are contract or legal or cost reasons. We have one system for email that someone paid way too much for and we are stuck with it because of it. That is one part of our infrastructure we don't control. We hate that we can't change is but we love that we don't have to manage it.
And it is very nice to have a consistent environment. All of our computers are from one manufacturer and we buy batches of the same model number when we can. We know our Windows 7 computer image will work with every computer and only have to update the image with new drives when we add a new model number (and only then if the drivers change).
Every situation is different in every company. A friend looking for an IT job saw one posting that he had to share with me. One requirement was to be able to implement the technology they use and not question it. Sometimes the part about being a good employee is doing what you are told.
I think you missed my disclaimer.
My issue is more that I just cant spell very well, I fat finger the keyboard, and have yet to add a spell checker to IE.
I have used user agent strings to track users for a long time. I added a custom tag a long time ago to make it unique.
Using NoScript tells them plenty of information.
You are either:
1) Aware of the security risk on the internet so you disabled javascript
2) You suffer from Paranoid Schizophrenia and don't want them controlling things
3) You have a serious aversion to adds
So the adds they should show you would go something like this in a jpg or animated gif (that is not a standard banner size).
Do you want that extra protection that you just can't get on your own? You need more information on how addvertisements and security threats work. Fallow this link to make sure you are informed. They are still watching you.
Sometimes they don't have to track you to figure out your habits
There is so much more COFEE should have done. It looks like it takes a look at your current running state. It grabs netwrok connections you have open, running processes, and user account names that are logged in. Things that get lost when you power a computer off. The autorun is just to make it simple for the user. I don't expect this is the only tool ran. I expect it is quick snapshot before you pull the plug.
Microsoft did take care to get the correct versions of the tools for each OS. You know how you can take some utils from XP and run on 2000 or Windows 7. This collection of tools looked like they should be able to run on any version. But for whatever reason they had a version of netstat for every Microsoft OS. My only reasoning for them to do it is for how it would stand up in the court room. It could be argued that using the XP version on the vista machine could have given invalid results because it was not ment to be ran on vista.
I have not looked at DECAF yet. But a simple root kit is all you need to defend this off. Hide running processes and network connections. Or better yet, stop breaking the law.
Develop an online presence is the best thing you can do. There are so many ways to do it too.
1) Start a blog. It can be about anything. It works best if you focus in on a topic.
2) Join a online community. If you blog about something, find others that cover the same topic and contribute comments. Find forums that cover things you are interested in and get involved. Ask some questions and later respond to other new people when you know the topic better. Post valid comments on slashdot or any other site like this.
3) Make something and share it. Write a macro, script, addon, program, or wallpaper and released it. contribute to open source projects, even it its just tracking down bugs. These create a conversation online and content that others will talk about or repeat.
4) Post your hard to find questions in newsgroups. These get mirriored all the time.
5) Link back to yourself when ever you can. If you have a signature, link back to your blog or project. Don't over do it.
6) ???
7) Profit
Sometimes it is just not that simple.
We have one software package that we have tried to phase out for several years. We do not support it, but a hand full of users still demand it. We do not have the power to not let them have it. We tried, but it is out of our hands.
We replaced a system that was central to the business we do 4 years ago. There were at most 5 options to choose from, only 2 were realistic options, and none of them ran on Linux or were OSS. The vender did give us a choice on database backend though. Pick SQL or ORACLE. The option we passed on did not give us that option.
In one area we do lots of specialized digital imaging. We use several different venders for different items and Linux support is not a feature they provide. In one case we cannot even get the software they provide to integrate into our central image store.
We have another software package that is central to another department that integrates features of office into and require office to be on the system. This is one such system where the users picked the features that they wanted and we picked from the limited selection of available software.
The IT we have are under staffed and over extended. There is a cost to retraining people to new products. There is a cost to replacing an existing product with something new. There is a cost to the amount of new help IT would have to provide. While you transition from one product to another, you have to support and know both. In most of these examples the product may be free but the time to do it has a huge price. More so when it currently works, users already know it, and you have bigger issues to deal with.
It may not be that simple for us to switch, I do think Microsoft recently created a window for others to make the jump. Office 2007 was a major change from 2003. The UI is so different, that it requires retraining of staff and a few days of lost productivity to make the change. Why not go open office, you have to retrain either way. Vista did the same thing. People that are on XP should be looking at OSX or Linux as an option to Windows 7. You already have to reinstall, get new drivers, get updated software. For the average user, it will make little difference what OS they are running. I can search the web and check my email from any one of them just as easy.
For as much as I would love to make the jump, I have nothing driving me to do it and only resistance preventing me from doing it.
I guess I did not know there was an option not to use the internal servers.
Our unit has its own domain and dns servers. The zone does get replicated to the central dns servers, but we have to use the Fully Qualified Domain Name of our servers when on computers outside our unit.
Have the users try the full name of the server and see if that helps.
In another year, most of the US wont remember who she is either.
Off the top of your head, how many VP picks of the party that didn't make it can you name.
So how do you explain your dna at the crime site?
I used to work in a cotton factory. its possible that cotton from that factory ended up to tbe the cotton they used. did you hear about that case where a woman's dna ....
I may have missed something. But if its seasonal, why create a new feed for each event?
Why not reuse the same feed over and over again each year? If you are getting alot of old requests, its possible that one of your old feeds is featured someplace or getting good search results. (not to mention all the old subscribers that already had it). Everyone that was involved in the old event would automaticly get the new content.
Think about it
It's interesting to see this shift.
It is now trying to protect the existing infections.
One interesting aspect of trying to make a game fair and balance is that rewards for beating content in large groups is left up to the groups to hand out.
In world of warcraft you have 10 to 25 people killing bosses that give 3-4 rewards and they have to decide on a way to handle it. In theory enough items should drop over time that everyone will get the items they need. But people fight to get the best items and over time that becomes the items that everyone wants.
Players have designed many systems of handing out loot based on various thing that they define as fair. That depends on leasdership and what their view of fair is. What is fair to the person that has been there for 2 years vs 2 months vs first time vs part time vs that one person you must have to do anything is very different. The experiences they have in real life or in game also impact that.
Every system has its advantages and problems. Do the people that need it just random for it, do the officers decide, do you hand out points for stuff and use them to "buy" the items with, or do you just take turns. You need leadership you can trust more then anything else to make any system work. Statistacly over time peaple tend to go for the same items and all a loot system does is change the order within the group that you get those items.
The thing is most games give the users no direction. This is good because it lets good leaders set up and run good systems that fit the group. But its also bad where people that should not be trusted are running it. Or in general where people have those differing oppinions of what is fair or what items they deserve will cause drama if left unchecked.
In my guild I use a solid system that fits our group. I don't have to step in and make jugement calls (calls that could be questioned) becuase the rules make those calls for me. I spent alot of time making those calls ahead of time when writting the rules. It keeps me and other officers on the same page and consistant. And everyone else knows what to expect every time a possible situation comes up.