Tuesday, August 10, 2010
New data comparing ineffectiveness of antivirus products
There’s really no good news here for antivirus vendors, or their customers.
Cyveillance, which touts itself as “a world leader in cyber intelligence”, has a press release announcing a study that seems to reveal the (really) bad news.
[T]raditional antivirus (AV) vendors continue to lag behind online criminals when it comes to detecting and protecting against new and quickly evolving threats on the Internet. Cyveillance testing shows that even the most popular AV signature-based solutions detect on average less than 19% of malware threats. That detection rate increases only to 61.7% after 30 days.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Windows is SO helpful or, cache is evil
It’s not Microsoft’s fault that desktop computing, computer in general really, is built on a foundation of sand, always threatening to give way and leave you homeless without warning.
I am, of course, speaking of how Windows caches network information. Read on for my solution.
[Read More…]
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Cool, free, wallpapers for RHEL/CentOS Desktops
Stumbled on this site the other day and downloaded some nice wallpapers for my CentOS desktop background from here. [Read More…]
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Desktop Systems Review: UI Rant Edition
Just got through the initial config of a brand new dual-core Windows 7 laptop and the re-image of an old Celeron laptop to CentOS 5.4 after a month with Fedora 12.
Let me cut to the chase: all of these new transparency happy, no-evidence-of-where-to-get-a-command-prompt, “simplified” (i.e. limited) configuration, tool-tip infested, “smarter”, “easier”, “intuitive”, 3rd (or is it 4th) generation personal computer gui environments suck.
They truly do.
There was a time when I had respect for gui designers. Windows 3.0 was and improvement on the “MSDOS Executive”. Windows 95’s “Start” menu, as much as I hate to admit it now, was an improvement over the tiles-in-a-window style of Windows 3.
But, although I was willing to put up with the candy-and-gumdrop theme advanced by Windows XP, I found myself in absolute rebellion when it came to Windows Vista. For the record, I didn’t begin reconfiguring all my Windows machines (including those running XP) to use the Classic theme until a month into my experience with Vista. I think Windows XP, at least, is greatly improved when run with the Classic theme. [Read More…]
Friday, March 19, 2010
Offline NT Password and Registry Editor
During the recent re-imaging of my company laptop with our firm standard XP image I ran into the usual difficulty that plagues former desktop engineers who no longer do desktop engineering — a perfectly good Ghost image of Windows XP that I didn’t have the admin password for.
Since leaving desktop work 9 years ago I had understandably not been kept in the loop on workstation administrative password changes.
The solution turned out to be quite simple, a bootable CD that included the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor. The .iso image found on the product web site is a stripped down Linux boot disk that includes the lastest fuse driver for reading and writing NTFS partitions. After downloading the .iso all you have to do is burn it to a blank CD and boot the target machine with it. The prompts to get you into the Password & Registry Editor are self-explanatory. The documentation and personal experience reveal that the most reliable way to deal with an unknown administrator password is to choose the option for simply blanking it out. Once the Win XP O/S comes back up after reboot you can then log in with an empty password.