Oh yeah... and I find it funny Google choose the install location they did. Programs are supposed to go into C:\Program Files*... but now MS has locked it down. So Chrome just installs itself elsewhere**. I see many more messy programs like this in the future.
* - I'm a rebel, I install all my programs in E:\Programs.
** - I checked, you can move it elsewhere without consequence if you want, just the profile location is hard coded and the uninstaller won't work obviously if you move it.
I dropped my Firefox startup time from 30-40 seconds to 6 seconds.
Wipe your profile except for bookmarks, history, cookies, and extensions and passwords. Wipe everything else and you might get rid of a couple files that Firefox is having trouble with.
Next if you use Adblock Plus, wipe the adblockplus folder. Adblock was adding 11 seconds onto startup for whatever dumb reason.
If you use FlashGot disabling automatic download manager detection (which causes a sub process to be launched every time Firefox starts up in Windows) could help, never benchmarked it though. You don't need it to run automatically, you can update the list manually through Options.
Block that IP from editing, and put a big banner (for that IP only) on top of every page explaining why. Also put a link to the HTTPS Wikipedia recommending it's use as you can't (currently) be monitored or censored if you use it. Of course they could just filter THAT.
Permanently redirect that IP to the HTTPS version of any accessed page. They may not like you circumventing their filter, but what are they gonna do, block Wikipedia?
Permanently redirect that IP to Wikipedia using the server IP. Depending on how the proxying is done, this may make their current solution impossible (I assume they make wikipedia.org resolve to their proxy name, which is then dedicated to the task of grabbing pages from wikipedia.org).
The amount of physical memory you have has nothing to do with the 2gb|2gb split or 3gb|1gb split. You can use your full 3gb either of physical memory either way, since the virtual mappings (which is what is split) is different for each app, so two apps can each use 1.5gb of user space and take up 3gb total memory.
The actual reason for the/3GB flag is to enable OS support for special applications which explicitly opt-in for up to 3gb of memory, usually to help boost performance (they can have a larger cache or buffer or whatever)... normal apps will still only be able to use up to 2gb because for compatibility. Apparently some apps use the highest bit of a 32-bit pointer to store a boolean, since with 2gb of user space that highest bit is always 0. Adding an extra 1gb allows that bit to be 1 which could seriously confuse the program, likely causing a crash.
SQL Server includes support for 3GB, IIRC.
I'm not sure if there's a downside to using 3gb (there must have been for it to be optional and hidden like that) especially since apparently Vista turns it on by default... however IIRC while each app gets it's own 2gb/3gb of userspace, kernel address space is shared between all apps, so your kernel only gets 1gb total memory. That includes all running drivers. I imagine the XP team thought it was better to allow for the total 2gb for drivers, especially since most apps couldn't take advantage of the full 3gb anyway (as I described above).
That is the important part. I am betting it doesn't happen through any flaw in Firefox (sounds like maybe a downloadable executable which looks for and then infects Firefox), but the article doesn't say.
Nowhere does it say it is Java. In fact, I don't see any Java. I see JavaScript, but that is completely unrelated to Java (if the name confuses you, take it up with Sun, their marketing department wanted to leech off of Java's success). There is only a JavaScript file and a Windows Netscape Plugin. So it probably only affects Windows.
Except a dialog box only pops up when installing addons from a trusted source. When an addon comes from an untrusted source you get the information bar, which you can ignore or close.
I'm guessing the page in the bug (it's a non existent domain) uses an endless stream of alert()s which is the issue you described but does not affect installing addons from untrusted sources.
Windows hasn't had a new filesystem that recently! NTFS was introduced in 1993. Windows has been using it for the past 15 years (if you only count the NT line, the 9x/ME line never even supported it IIRC, they just used the even older FAT32).
Of course if you want to count the small extensions added on with each windows version then your claim about Windows is correct. Still I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Vista filesystems mount inside NT 3.1. I should test this with a VM...
Rootkits are not undetectable. Though in theory they can be, in practice fully scrubbing the files from all file request APIs can be difficult. Most scanners will use the high-level APIs (which are most likely to be manipulated by rootkits) as well as a low-level API (such as undocumented kernel functions or even direct hard drive access) which is far more difficult for the rootkit to manipulate... then they compare the results of the two scans. Any discrepancies are reported to the user as possible rootkits. MS hides some system-critical files from normal viewing, even if you choose to show system and hidden files, such as the master file table:
C:\>dir $*
Volume in drive C is Windows XP
Volume Serial Number is DEAD-BEEF
Directory of C:\
File Not Found
C:\>type nonexistantfile
The system cannot find the file specified.
C:\>type $MFT
Access is denied.
(Yes that is my real volume serial number. No it wasn't like that when I got it, I changed it.)
These files are small in number and so hard-coded into most rootkit scanners to ignore. Other legit reasons for discrepancies can be attributed to files being created or deleted between the two scans. Anything that's left can be Googled or otherwise analyzed to determine if it is a rootkit.
Of course an even easier way to find rootkits is to boot from a known rootkit-free environment (BartPE, Linux LiveCD) and run a scan on the suspected rootkit-infected volume.
I had a similar situation. I used Proxifier (a commercial tool, Privoxy seems to be a free type of the same tool, though I never got that to work) to force Steam to use the HTTP proxy all our web traffic had to go through. Worked fine, game updates, friends, all worked.
Played a few fun Counter-Strike: Source LAN games until ITS blocked 'em.:(
The Left 4 Dead demo no longer exists. If you have it on your Steam account, Steam will insist you don't own it and will try to get you to purchase it (which is impossible since it's a demo).
Also Source mods have NEVER been playable using a demo of a Source engine game. You need a full game, which will unlock the Source SDK Base (and Source SDK Base - Orange Box) which needs to be installed to play Source mods.
UDP is simpler than TCP, so I don't see how switching to UDP would hurt the internet.
Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine. That's just a consequence of the way Bittorrent works.
If there is no compensation for lost UDP packets (TCP compensates by detecting and resending lost packets), the chunk (about 64kb IIRC) will not hash right and will need to be redownloaded, not just the packet (a packet can hold what 1-1.5kb? I think it varies from network to network, but TCP packets have a lot of metadata bundled and so can carry less data per packet... something like 512b IIRC).
Of course lost packets don't occur as often as you might think, in my experience. I've made a program to query Valve game servers, and this uses UDP. While testing I don't recall noticing lost packets at all.
And of course there's always the chance that uTorrent will compensate for lost packets itself anyway. Such an implementation would likely be lighter-weight than TCP anyway (otherwise why bother?) and have less metadata per packet, allowing for faster transfers (more data per packet).
Actually I can play Tomb Raider on a virtual machine without needing any silly WARP.
Also it didn't use DirectX, it was DOS based. I understand there are alternate rendering DLLs you can drop in to give it hardware acceleration on modern platforms, though.
Sound files are needed if your server uses sv_pure, AFAIK. The server needs all the game resources to compare files hashes with the hashes the client sends to be sure they're not replacing files. A common reason to use sv_pure would be to prevent TF2 cheaters from replacing, say, the soft "spy decloak" sound FX with a REALLY LOUD NOISE, which would make it a lot easier to hear any nearby spies.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah... and I find it funny Google choose the install location they did. Programs are supposed to go into C:\Program Files*... but now MS has locked it down. So Chrome just installs itself elsewhere**. I see many more messy programs like this in the future.
* - I'm a rebel, I install all my programs in E:\Programs.
** - I checked, you can move it elsewhere without consequence if you want, just the profile location is hard coded and the uninstaller won't work obviously if you move it.
If users can download and run arbitrary files from the internet you have bigger problems to worry about methinks.
I dropped my Firefox startup time from 30-40 seconds to 6 seconds.
Wipe your profile except for bookmarks, history, cookies, and extensions and passwords. Wipe everything else and you might get rid of a couple files that Firefox is having trouble with.
Next if you use Adblock Plus, wipe the adblockplus folder. Adblock was adding 11 seconds onto startup for whatever dumb reason.
If you use FlashGot disabling automatic download manager detection (which causes a sub process to be launched every time Firefox starts up in Windows) could help, never benchmarked it though. You don't need it to run automatically, you can update the list manually through Options.
So much for preview preventing errors... oops.
[url=http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm]Trythis.[/url] It's tiding me over until we get an Adblock extension.
Check Scheduled Tasks. Google Chrome installs it there. The service were probably installed by some other Google product.
Actually it's .wri files, which haven't been savable in Windows since 3.1.
And now she's going to run find / -name '.bash_history'
That's funny, I always thought it was a citizen's (of the USA at least) duty to report crimes to the police if you witness them.
http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/
(Not that your link doesn't have good points, but I like mine too.)
Here are my ideas:
Block that IP from editing, and put a big banner (for that IP only) on top of every page explaining why. Also put a link to the HTTPS Wikipedia recommending it's use as you can't (currently) be monitored or censored if you use it. Of course they could just filter THAT.
Permanently redirect that IP to the HTTPS version of any accessed page. They may not like you circumventing their filter, but what are they gonna do, block Wikipedia?
Permanently redirect that IP to Wikipedia using the server IP. Depending on how the proxying is done, this may make their current solution impossible (I assume they make wikipedia.org resolve to their proxy name, which is then dedicated to the task of grabbing pages from wikipedia.org).
The amount of physical memory you have has nothing to do with the 2gb|2gb split or 3gb|1gb split. You can use your full 3gb either of physical memory either way, since the virtual mappings (which is what is split) is different for each app, so two apps can each use 1.5gb of user space and take up 3gb total memory.
The actual reason for the /3GB flag is to enable OS support for special applications which explicitly opt-in for up to 3gb of memory, usually to help boost performance (they can have a larger cache or buffer or whatever)... normal apps will still only be able to use up to 2gb because for compatibility. Apparently some apps use the highest bit of a 32-bit pointer to store a boolean, since with 2gb of user space that highest bit is always 0. Adding an extra 1gb allows that bit to be 1 which could seriously confuse the program, likely causing a crash.
SQL Server includes support for 3GB, IIRC.
I'm not sure if there's a downside to using 3gb (there must have been for it to be optional and hidden like that) especially since apparently Vista turns it on by default... however IIRC while each app gets it's own 2gb/3gb of userspace, kernel address space is shared between all apps, so your kernel only gets 1gb total memory. That includes all running drivers. I imagine the XP team thought it was better to allow for the total 2gb for drivers, especially since most apps couldn't take advantage of the full 3gb anyway (as I described above).
Try making a blank C:\pagefile.sys file and see if that helps?
That is the important part. I am betting it doesn't happen through any flaw in Firefox (sounds like maybe a downloadable executable which looks for and then infects Firefox), but the article doesn't say.
Nowhere does it say it is Java. In fact, I don't see any Java. I see JavaScript, but that is completely unrelated to Java (if the name confuses you, take it up with Sun, their marketing department wanted to leech off of Java's success). There is only a JavaScript file and a Windows Netscape Plugin. So it probably only affects Windows.
Except a dialog box only pops up when installing addons from a trusted source. When an addon comes from an untrusted source you get the information bar, which you can ignore or close.
I'm guessing the page in the bug (it's a non existent domain) uses an endless stream of alert()s which is the issue you described but does not affect installing addons from untrusted sources.
Windows hasn't had a new filesystem that recently! NTFS was introduced in 1993. Windows has been using it for the past 15 years (if you only count the NT line, the 9x/ME line never even supported it IIRC, they just used the even older FAT32).
Of course if you want to count the small extensions added on with each windows version then your claim about Windows is correct. Still I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Vista filesystems mount inside NT 3.1. I should test this with a VM...
Rootkits are not undetectable. Though in theory they can be, in practice fully scrubbing the files from all file request APIs can be difficult. Most scanners will use the high-level APIs (which are most likely to be manipulated by rootkits) as well as a low-level API (such as undocumented kernel functions or even direct hard drive access) which is far more difficult for the rootkit to manipulate... then they compare the results of the two scans. Any discrepancies are reported to the user as possible rootkits. MS hides some system-critical files from normal viewing, even if you choose to show system and hidden files, such as the master file table:
C:\>dir $*
Volume in drive C is Windows XP
Volume Serial Number is DEAD-BEEF
Directory of C:\
File Not Found
C:\>type nonexistantfile
The system cannot find the file specified.
C:\>type $MFT
Access is denied.
(Yes that is my real volume serial number. No it wasn't like that when I got it, I changed it.)
These files are small in number and so hard-coded into most rootkit scanners to ignore. Other legit reasons for discrepancies can be attributed to files being created or deleted between the two scans. Anything that's left can be Googled or otherwise analyzed to determine if it is a rootkit.
Of course an even easier way to find rootkits is to boot from a known rootkit-free environment (BartPE, Linux LiveCD) and run a scan on the suspected rootkit-infected volume.
I had a similar situation. I used Proxifier (a commercial tool, Privoxy seems to be a free type of the same tool, though I never got that to work) to force Steam to use the HTTP proxy all our web traffic had to go through. Worked fine, game updates, friends, all worked.
Played a few fun Counter-Strike: Source LAN games until ITS blocked 'em. :(
The Left 4 Dead demo no longer exists. If you have it on your Steam account, Steam will insist you don't own it and will try to get you to purchase it (which is impossible since it's a demo).
Also Source mods have NEVER been playable using a demo of a Source engine game. You need a full game, which will unlock the Source SDK Base (and Source SDK Base - Orange Box) which needs to be installed to play Source mods.
UDP is simpler than TCP, so I don't see how switching to UDP would hurt the internet.
If there is no compensation for lost UDP packets (TCP compensates by detecting and resending lost packets), the chunk (about 64kb IIRC) will not hash right and will need to be redownloaded, not just the packet (a packet can hold what 1-1.5kb? I think it varies from network to network, but TCP packets have a lot of metadata bundled and so can carry less data per packet... something like 512b IIRC).
Of course lost packets don't occur as often as you might think, in my experience. I've made a program to query Valve game servers, and this uses UDP. While testing I don't recall noticing lost packets at all.
And of course there's always the chance that uTorrent will compensate for lost packets itself anyway. Such an implementation would likely be lighter-weight than TCP anyway (otherwise why bother?) and have less metadata per packet, allowing for faster transfers (more data per packet).
Actually I can play Tomb Raider on a virtual machine without needing any silly WARP.
Also it didn't use DirectX, it was DOS based. I understand there are alternate rendering DLLs you can drop in to give it hardware acceleration on modern platforms, though.
Sound files are needed if your server uses sv_pure, AFAIK. The server needs all the game resources to compare files hashes with the hashes the client sends to be sure they're not replacing files. A common reason to use sv_pure would be to prevent TF2 cheaters from replacing, say, the soft "spy decloak" sound FX with a REALLY LOUD NOISE, which would make it a lot easier to hear any nearby spies.
http://www.teamfortress2.de/gfx/screenshots/tf2/tf2_sandvich.jpg
They even show the health benefits of each food group!
Yup, back when "plug-in" meant it didn't run on batteries.