Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Happy Chinese New Year!
Not to take away from the post below, but this seems more important.
Wish you all a Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you all the best in the year to come!
Here's an amazing site to check out what's your Chinese sign and what's your outlook this year!!!
http://www.chinesezodiachoroscope.com/
Wish you all a Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you all the best in the year to come!
Here's an amazing site to check out what's your Chinese sign and what's your outlook this year!!!
http://www.chinesezodiachoroscope.com/
Coming soon: Superduper is Super Duper!
After talking with a resident mac guru I checked out a few gem utilities.
The next post will be some great administrative and backup functions for you mac users.
I'll cover:
- Imaging your Mac with Superduper!
- Migrating your data and apps with the mac migration assistant!
Not to leave you XP users out of the loop, I plan on doing a post on slipstreaming a SP3 xp installation.
The next post will be some great administrative and backup functions for you mac users.
I'll cover:
- Imaging your Mac with Superduper!
- Migrating your data and apps with the mac migration assistant!
Not to leave you XP users out of the loop, I plan on doing a post on slipstreaming a SP3 xp installation.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Creating a strong password.
In light of what I've been recently researching and posting about virus and trojans which are here:
15 Million PCs Infected
and
Antivirus 2009, What a Pain!
I felt obligated to post this one.
OK, Where do we start,
Creating a Strong password
Pick a strong password. There are a few great guidelines to having a secure password.
- At least 6 Characters
- Have the password contain both alphabet and numeric characters
- If possible, have the password contain non-character symbols like these: @#$%^&**()!
- Try not to use straight forward dictionary words, as a start someone who really wanted to get into your account will somehow utilize a program and it will start with the dictionary and names.
As a great example, We’ll create one here, start with a phrase like:
Merry christmas everyone
*Keep the spaces in since they are non-standard characters. We’ll add more later.
Merry christmas everyone
*pick some letters to substitue with numbers for this example I’ll choose to replace the “E” with the number 3, and the “o” with a zero “0”
M3rrychristmas3v3ry0n3
Next put some more non-standard characters in there. I’ll choose to replace the “I” with an exclamation mark ! In total I'll add one to replace the "I" and another at the end just for fun.
M3rrychr!stmas3v3ry0n3!
And there you have it. We have just built a very strong password. Although I would stongly recommend not to use this password for your personal use, I’m sure you could use your creativity and pick out a password that is right for you.
General notes about passwords, the people who usually want access to your system are sometimes the people who may come in contact with you frequently, so using for example, your children’s names, your phone number, the company you work for would be highly not recommended.
15 Million PCs Infected
and
Antivirus 2009, What a Pain!
I felt obligated to post this one.
OK, Where do we start,
Creating a Strong password
Pick a strong password. There are a few great guidelines to having a secure password.
- At least 6 Characters
- Have the password contain both alphabet and numeric characters
- If possible, have the password contain non-character symbols like these: @#$%^&**()!
- Try not to use straight forward dictionary words, as a start someone who really wanted to get into your account will somehow utilize a program and it will start with the dictionary and names.
As a great example, We’ll create one here, start with a phrase like:
Merry christmas everyone
*Keep the spaces in since they are non-standard characters. We’ll add more later.
Merry christmas everyone
*pick some letters to substitue with numbers for this example I’ll choose to replace the “E” with the number 3, and the “o” with a zero “0”
M3rrychristmas3v3ry0n3
Next put some more non-standard characters in there. I’ll choose to replace the “I” with an exclamation mark ! In total I'll add one to replace the "I" and another at the end just for fun.
M3rrychr!stmas3v3ry0n3!
And there you have it. We have just built a very strong password. Although I would stongly recommend not to use this password for your personal use, I’m sure you could use your creativity and pick out a password that is right for you.
General notes about passwords, the people who usually want access to your system are sometimes the people who may come in contact with you frequently, so using for example, your children’s names, your phone number, the company you work for would be highly not recommended.
15 million PC's infected with Confliker
Update:
Apparently this thing is sooo out of control.. Microsoft now has a bounty on it.
Microsoft dangles $250,000 carrot for capture of Conficker creator
15 million PC's infected with Confliker
All I can say about this one is that it takes advantage of weak passwords like "123456" and "password".
wow.. I'm not using those passwords for any systems again.
update: Forget about what I just said about easy passwords, this sucker has a built in password cracker!
"The worm also has a password-cracker that is adept at cracking administrative accounts or other computers, though very strong passwords should make that much harder, Cross says."
By Ellen Messmer , Network World , 01/23/2009
Source: Network World
Apparently this thing is sooo out of control.. Microsoft now has a bounty on it.
Microsoft dangles $250,000 carrot for capture of Conficker creator
15 million PC's infected with Confliker
All I can say about this one is that it takes advantage of weak passwords like "123456" and "password".
wow.. I'm not using those passwords for any systems again.
update: Forget about what I just said about easy passwords, this sucker has a built in password cracker!
"The worm also has a password-cracker that is adept at cracking administrative accounts or other computers, though very strong passwords should make that much harder, Cross says."
By Ellen Messmer , Network World , 01/23/2009
Source: Network World
Antivirus 2009, What a pain!
All I do all day is work with computers, and what myself and my colleagues have been witness to is every other indecent we get in seems to be someone contracting the hoax trojan antivirus 2009.
It seems this thing is really wide spread.
As of December approx 400,000 machines infected
You might get it visiting some random page and and a pop-up gives you some window scaring you with how many viruses you have on your machine, then from there on, you can click and install, you can even click through more once you installed the program to actually pay for the program.
It will stay on your system, paying and giving your credit card does nothing to get rid of it. (mind you, you'll probably have bigger issues if you did that but will only find out when you credit card statement comes in).
Microsoft has declared a fix.
The official microsoft fix is here.
Here is also 2 links I found very useful for removing the program manually, if the microsoft fix doesn't work.
Why shouldn't this microsoft fix work I say? Well it was on the Microsoft platform that this Trojan had spread itself.
I found a source for quick removal.
I gotta give my sources credit. You can check out srajure's profile page here.
Video
Also srajure's further detailed information and instructions on how to remove it.
It seems this thing is really wide spread.
As of December approx 400,000 machines infected
You might get it visiting some random page and and a pop-up gives you some window scaring you with how many viruses you have on your machine, then from there on, you can click and install, you can even click through more once you installed the program to actually pay for the program.
It will stay on your system, paying and giving your credit card does nothing to get rid of it. (mind you, you'll probably have bigger issues if you did that but will only find out when you credit card statement comes in).
Microsoft has declared a fix.
The official microsoft fix is here.
Here is also 2 links I found very useful for removing the program manually, if the microsoft fix doesn't work.
Why shouldn't this microsoft fix work I say? Well it was on the Microsoft platform that this Trojan had spread itself.
I found a source for quick removal.
I gotta give my sources credit. You can check out srajure's profile page here.
Video
Also srajure's further detailed information and instructions on how to remove it.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Fail! Not Suitable for Laptop Use.
Hello, I just want to start off my first technical post about something I found very odd. I picked up a seagate hard drive from a local computer shop yesterday and found this at the top of the sticker:
"NOT SUITABLE FOR LAPTOP COMPUTER USE"
Click on the picture and see for yourself... I was just .. stupified!
Well Geeze, a laptop drive that you can't put in a laptop?
That's like building a car that can't be driven.
As for Seagate, it looks like they are having other huge problems on their own with their barracuda models where they are failing by what seems like the thousands.
A limited number of Seagate hard drives from the following families could potentially become inaccessible when the host system is powered on:
Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
Firmware Recommendations for Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 Drives [207931]
At first Seagate offered assistance with data recovery. Way to go Seagate for taking responsibility by saying:
"There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business."
Now it just says...
"In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss associated with this issue."
No data loss - we can only hope.
Wow.. Drives that don't go in machines and the ones that do - get bricked.
One word.
Fail.
Oh and since I'm at it, don't forget this one.
In 2007 - The manufacturing flaw in Seagate models ST96812AS and ST98823AS,commonly found in notebooks such as Apple's MacBook or MacBook Pros
What can I say, you keep making them and I'll keep fixing em.
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