I believe the Windows Update client (the one that sits in the System Tray, not the web site) just uses the latent bandwidth of the connection to download patches, so the user should not notice it until the patch is ready to be installed.
Aside from that, enable the firewall (or install a third-party firewall of your choice), install one of the free Antivirus packages, disable any unnecessary services and make sure "File & Printer Sharing" and "Client for Microsoft networks" are not enabled for the dial-up connection and things should be fairly secure -- or at least no less so than the current Win95 setup.
Or, for that matter, a virus that can automatically FTP itself to a server somewhere.
But surely that's exactly what viruses would evolve to do if e-mail attachments suddenly became unviable -- some already propagate via open network shares, Instant Messanging systems etc.
Re:Viruses don't die ..
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft have a CD you can get for free containing most of that:
The Windows Security Update CD will be shipped to you free of charge. This CD includes Microsoft critical updates released through October 2003 and information to help you protect your PC. In addition, you will also receive a free antivirus and firewall trial software CD.
This CD is only available for Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98, and Windows 98 Second Edition (SE).
Obviously it will get out-of-date, but it's a good start...
Interestingly in the UK, I understand that Microsoft have effectively banned computer magazines from carrying copies of the latest patches etc on their cover CDs, preferring users to download from Microsoft directly, which is obviously a major inconvenience for those without broadband.
"...core Windows components are being recompiled with the most recent version of our compiler technology to help mitigate against buffer overruns."
So it's large because most of the binaries have been recompiled, even ones where the code hasn't changed.
However, the main thing that drew my attention was this, which Ars Technica only briefly mentioned:
Additionally, Microsoft is working with microprocessor companies to help Windows support hardware-enforced "no execute" (or NX) on microprocessors that contain the feature. NX uses the CPU itself to enforce the separation of application code and data, preventing an application or Windows component from executing program code that an attacking worm or virus inserted into a portion of memory marked for data only."
Its not unrealistic to expect that something you paid for not be defective and just plain work.
It's all about the consequence of failure, however probable or improbable the failure might be; it's worth it if the data is that important.
It's also worth noting that it's not just hardware failure you're guarding against by making backups -- a mistyped command, some malware, or lightning strike on the phone line that fries the modem, the connected PC and most of its components etc etc can all cause you to lose data too.
This is an even worse idea than WINE. The only thing we'll gain from this is even fewer native Linux drivers. Im sure that if this works, many hardware companies won't even consider making native Linux drivers, because users can just use DriverLoader.
Alternatively, if hardware companies see their hardware being purchased and used for Linux boxes because of this wrapper then maybe that will encourage them to write native drivers in the future.
It will get over the initial problem of showing the bosses that there is an active market, because this wrapper will allow one to get established, and they'll be able to see that it's worth spending at least some development time on.
Even if the automation was forced, the problem is that the majority of internet users still use dial-up. They are at a lower risk for infection, but they are still at risk (trust me, my father-in-law got hit by it). The problem with dial-up users is that they don't want to spend literally hours downloading patches, so they don't patch their system.
The patch could be downloaded using latent bandwidth of the connection whenever it was available -- indeed I believe that's the way it works at the moment.
It doesn't all have to be downloaded at once, or max out the connection in the process. Even if it takes a couple of weeks for a big patch to finally get downloaded in the background, it's better than nothing...
By the way, has anyone noticed that music on the radio often sounds like it has been run through a lossy compressor now days, especially those stations owned by clear channel or other large media companies. When sitting at home listening though my stereo I here the most terrible sounding music I have ever heard. Pop in a CD of the same song and it sounds really good. There is some loss in radio, but this isn't radio loss, this is psychoacoustic compression loss.
Yep. In fact, here in the UK some of the radio stations actually speed up the songs by several percent -- presumably so they have more time for adverts, or so they can say they play more songs per hour than anyone else -- and no, they don't even bother to try and pitch-shift the resultant audio so that it sounds even slightly correct.
They also reduce the dynamic range of the song substantially and do other tricks to the audio so they sound "louder" than other stations.
They then use some lossy format on the playout equipment in the studio (some actually use[d] MiniDisk).
Of course if you then listen on DAB (digital radio, using MP2 compression I believe) at the inevitable 128Kbit (the legal minimum bitrate the Radio Authority set) it gets even worse...
Why are all these end users turning off the auto update features
I've seen a couple of XP machines that the OEM pre-install defaults to having updates switched off -- I guess the OEMs just don't want the hassle of users phoning them up asking whether or not to install the patch, or dealing with problems from broken patches. I wonder how many calls they're getting that the moment...
I use PocoMail, definitely the best e-mail client I've used on Windows. It's fast, compact, has its own HTML renderer that can block remote images, and generally has lots of neat usability features. Discovered it a couple of months ago and immediately switched from Eudora.
It's shareware, but there's a decent trial period on it (when expired, it will simply disable checking for new mail), and it only costs about $25.
ROX is a desktop manager that isn't about mimicking any "desktop style", but focuses on usability issues [...]
Probably worth mentioning that these usability concepts (Application Filer, Drag & Drop Saving etc) were originally based on RISC OS; ROX stands for "RISC OS on X".
When I did use RISC OS, I always found the Filer a quite intuitive way of working, although it could sometimes be easy to lose a filer window behind the application, and thus require you to move/resize windows around to be able to drag and drop the save file into the filer window. However, as RISC OS only brought a window to the front if you clicked on one of the window gadgets (titlebar, size icon etc) it was possible to have the filer window open over the application, and still activate drag and drop save from the app to the filer window in the foreground. Pretty good considering the system was released some 15 years ago.
I haven't used ROX since I briefly tried the 1.0 release, so I'll be interested to give this latest version a go, especially since I no longer use RISC OS for day-to-day use.
Well it will certainly get them a lot of publicity, and probably at least another/. article or two along the lines of "Google forces Roogle name and/or logo change". So even if they're forced to change their identity later, they still get far more publicity than if they simply launched with a more innocuous name in the first place.
I was once working on my system with the hard drive (IBM) on the desk to the side of the case. There was some stuff on the top of the tower case and a couple of items (a CD and DVD in cases) inevitably fell on the drive whilst it was running.
The computer crashed when this happened but rebooted apparently fine, so I decided to switch off and tidy up:) However over the next couple of days I'd get random crashes, although only whilst the machine was under high load.
It turned out that there were now a few bad sectors near the end of the swapfile, and when the machine tried to swap to that area, it crashed. After mapping out the area of bad sectors, that drive has continued to run for the last three years (just as a temp drive, not for anything important).
I wonder how feasible it would be to use IE's ActiveX / Install-On-Demand features to easily offer the download of Mozilla/Phoenix/etc to the user's machine?
e.g. the first time a user browses to a particular site, they are met with a dialog stating "We believe this site will display better in Mozilla. Would you like to download and install Mozilla now? (This will take roughly x minutes at your current connection speed.)"
If the user clicks "Yes", the new browser automatically downloads, installs and launches with the original site displayed. If the user clicks "No", the dialog never appears for that site again.
No heavy-handed tactics, just a simple one-off question for the user.
After all, people already use this mechanism to download browser plugins (or some adware/spyware etc) so it should be very familiar.
Kinda off-topic, but the Win2K command prompt also has this functionality, except that for some silly reason it's turned off by default. I think I used TweakUI to turn it on.
It goes back even further than that; I've used it on NT4 too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's been hidden in the NT product line from the outset. Like you, I had to use TweakUI or edit the Registry (don't remember right now) to enable it.
If you're on Win2K or later, check out Junction from SysInternals. It can create directory-based symlinks on NTFS. Not sure if it's exactly what you're after, but it's pretty useful anyway...
Don't know about 6.x as it is not installed on any of our 1200+ nt4 and w2k boxes (compatability problems with several internal IIS sites; go figure).
Had the same problem, turned out that IE6 kept losing the Session ID when connecting to a web server with an _ (underscore) character in the name. Maybe that's causing your problem too?
I've heard good things about MailWasher. Their site seems to indicate that it can be used by any Windows POP3 mail client. Never used it myself though (running SpamAssassin on the server).
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the Windows Update client (the one that sits in the System Tray, not the web site) just uses the latent bandwidth of the connection to download patches, so the user should not notice it until the patch is ready to be installed.
Aside from that, enable the firewall (or install a third-party firewall of your choice), install one of the free Antivirus packages, disable any unnecessary services and make sure "File & Printer Sharing" and "Client for Microsoft networks" are not enabled for the dial-up connection and things should be fairly secure -- or at least no less so than the current Win95 setup.
Oh, and install SP2 when it's available too.
Windows Security Update CD Obviously it will get out-of-date, but it's a good start...
Interestingly in the UK, I understand that Microsoft have effectively banned computer magazines from carrying copies of the latest patches etc on their cover CDs, preferring users to download from Microsoft directly, which is obviously a major inconvenience for those without broadband.
So it's large because most of the binaries have been recompiled, even ones where the code hasn't changed.
However, the main thing that drew my attention was this, which Ars Technica only briefly mentioned:(lots more detail on the MSDN link)
Its not unrealistic to expect that something you paid for not be defective and just plain work.
It's all about the consequence of failure, however probable or improbable the failure might be; it's worth it if the data is that important.
It's also worth noting that it's not just hardware failure you're guarding against by making backups -- a mistyped command, some malware, or lightning strike on the phone line that fries the modem, the connected PC and most of its components etc etc can all cause you to lose data too.
Here you go... appears to be an official site for their ads, and it's got the "Honda" one:
http://www.the118118experience.com/
This is an even worse idea than WINE. The only thing we'll gain from this is even fewer native Linux drivers. Im sure that if this works, many hardware companies won't even consider making native Linux drivers, because users can just use DriverLoader.
Alternatively, if hardware companies see their hardware being purchased and used for Linux boxes because of this wrapper then maybe that will encourage them to write native drivers in the future.
It will get over the initial problem of showing the bosses that there is an active market, because this wrapper will allow one to get established, and they'll be able to see that it's worth spending at least some development time on.
It doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Disable DCOM?.
The patch could be downloaded using latent bandwidth of the connection whenever it was available -- indeed I believe that's the way it works at the moment.
It doesn't all have to be downloaded at once, or max out the connection in the process. Even if it takes a couple of weeks for a big patch to finally get downloaded in the background, it's better than nothing...
Yep. In fact, here in the UK some of the radio stations actually speed up the songs by several percent -- presumably so they have more time for adverts, or so they can say they play more songs per hour than anyone else -- and no, they don't even bother to try and pitch-shift the resultant audio so that it sounds even slightly correct.
They also reduce the dynamic range of the song substantially and do other tricks to the audio so they sound "louder" than other stations.
They then use some lossy format on the playout equipment in the studio (some actually use[d] MiniDisk).
Of course if you then listen on DAB (digital radio, using MP2 compression I believe) at the inevitable 128Kbit (the legal minimum bitrate the Radio Authority set) it gets even worse...
I've seen a couple of XP machines that the OEM pre-install defaults to having updates switched off -- I guess the OEMs just don't want the hassle of users phoning them up asking whether or not to install the patch, or dealing with problems from broken patches. I wonder how many calls they're getting that the moment...
suggestions for best non-outlook email program?
I use PocoMail, definitely the best e-mail client I've used on Windows. It's fast, compact, has its own HTML renderer that can block remote images, and generally has lots of neat usability features. Discovered it a couple of months ago and immediately switched from Eudora.
It's shareware, but there's a decent trial period on it (when expired, it will simply disable checking for new mail), and it only costs about $25.
ROX is a desktop manager that isn't about mimicking any "desktop style", but focuses on usability issues [...]
Probably worth mentioning that these usability concepts (Application Filer, Drag & Drop Saving etc) were originally based on RISC OS; ROX stands for "RISC OS on X".
When I did use RISC OS, I always found the Filer a quite intuitive way of working, although it could sometimes be easy to lose a filer window behind the application, and thus require you to move/resize windows around to be able to drag and drop the save file into the filer window. However, as RISC OS only brought a window to the front if you clicked on one of the window gadgets (titlebar, size icon etc) it was possible to have the filer window open over the application, and still activate drag and drop save from the app to the filer window in the foreground. Pretty good considering the system was released some 15 years ago.
I haven't used ROX since I briefly tried the 1.0 release, so I'll be interested to give this latest version a go, especially since I no longer use RISC OS for day-to-day use.
Well it will certainly get them a lot of publicity, and probably at least another /. article or two along the lines of "Google forces Roogle name and/or logo change". So even if they're forced to change their identity later, they still get far more publicity than if they simply launched with a more innocuous name in the first place.
I was once working on my system with the hard drive (IBM) on the desk to the side of the case. There was some stuff on the top of the tower case and a couple of items (a CD and DVD in cases) inevitably fell on the drive whilst it was running.
:) However over the next couple of days I'd get random crashes, although only whilst the machine was under high load.
The computer crashed when this happened but rebooted apparently fine, so I decided to switch off and tidy up
It turned out that there were now a few bad sectors near the end of the swapfile, and when the machine tried to swap to that area, it crashed. After mapping out the area of bad sectors, that drive has continued to run for the last three years (just as a temp drive, not for anything important).
I wonder how feasible it would be to use IE's ActiveX / Install-On-Demand features to easily offer the download of Mozilla/Phoenix/etc to the user's machine?
e.g. the first time a user browses to a particular site, they are met with a dialog stating "We believe this site will display better in Mozilla. Would you like to download and install Mozilla now? (This will take roughly x minutes at your current connection speed.)"
If the user clicks "Yes", the new browser automatically downloads, installs and launches with the original site displayed. If the user clicks "No", the dialog never appears for that site again.
No heavy-handed tactics, just a simple one-off question for the user.
After all, people already use this mechanism to download browser plugins (or some adware/spyware etc) so it should be very familiar.
Kinda off-topic, but the Win2K command prompt also has this functionality, except that for some silly reason it's turned off by default. I think I used TweakUI to turn it on.
It goes back even further than that; I've used it on NT4 too, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's been hidden in the NT product line from the outset. Like you, I had to use TweakUI or edit the Registry (don't remember right now) to enable it.
If you're on Win2K or later, check out Junction from SysInternals. It can create directory-based symlinks on NTFS. Not sure if it's exactly what you're after, but it's pretty useful anyway...
Don't know about 6.x as it is not installed on any of our 1200+ nt4 and w2k boxes (compatability problems with several internal IIS sites; go figure).
Had the same problem, turned out that IE6 kept losing the Session ID when connecting to a web server with an _ (underscore) character in the name. Maybe that's causing your problem too?
I've heard good things about MailWasher. Their site seems to indicate that it can be used by any Windows POP3 mail client. Never used it myself though (running SpamAssassin on the server).