Archive for February, 2010
Windows 7: What happened to Control Alt Delete to logon?
Feb 12th
I work in a corporate environment where security is a big deal. Any little piece of added security is embraced and when Microsoft did away with secured login’s via Control – Alt – Delete I needed to find another way to enable it. When you have to press that key combo now referred to as CAD you are making sure that the login window is an actual login window and not a password stealing application.
Also when remotely connecting to a machine and automating tasks (as in an attack) this can add an additional step for the hackers to overcome. Any little bit helps!
Here is what we need to do to fix the situation (found from CNet):
Go to the old Start button, now just a Windows logo. In the search box, type netplwiz and press enter or click on the result.
A pane called user accounts will appear.
Click on the Advanced tab.
At the bottom of the screen, under secure log-on, check "require users to press Ctrl + Alt + Delete"
Now when you log-in to your computer, you’ll have a rather boring pane asking for Ctrl-Alt-Del, which you’ll have to press before you can get to the log-in page.
Do you have some tips or tricks to share with us? If so please leave them in the comments.
Windows 7: The calculator has a lot of new features.
Feb 12th
Did you ever download a third party calculator for statistics or other functions you just couldn’t do? Well they are built in to Windows 7 now!
That is all…
lookInMyPC lets you create detailed reports.
Feb 11th
Check out http://www.lookinmypc.com/ to download an application that you can run on a suspect machine before you begin to repair it. This is very handy! You can see a sample report here: http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage1.htm
Direct from their website:
Several years ago, we incorporated a system into our popular CYBERsitter product that allowed users to include a complete system profile automatically whenever they requested technical support. This helps reduce support costs and provide accurate solutions to users issues quickly. This has proven to be so useful, we decided to offer a stand alone version and make it available to everyone for free. With over 15 years experience in developing and supporting commercial software, we have included every item about the system we would like to know about when a user needs help. Whether you are a computer novice or a seasoned professional, LookInMyPC is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting problems and seeing what is actually going on inside your computer.
LookInMyPC generates a complete, comprehensive system profile that includes information on all installed hardware and software. Additionally it provides system diagnostic information such as details on running processes, installed services, startup programs, Windows updates and hot fixes, active network and Internet connections, TCP/IP port usage, event log detail, and much more. All this is provided in an easy to read, formatted report that you can view and print using your web browser. We have also hyperlinked many items so you can quickly and easily "Google" them to find out what they are or if some programs might be spyware or viruses. It is also completely non-invasive and makes no changes to your computers settings whatsoever. We have even included a handy function that allows you to create a full system profile and diagnostic report and automatically send it as an email ZIP file attachment to a tech support or help desk person.
Best of all, it’s completely FREE for personal and commercial use. There is no adware, no spyware, no system drivers, no hidden malware of any kind, nothing. No information is ever transmitted to anyone (unless you want it to).
[Via Lifehacker]
Australian dude has to pay 1.5mil for uploading Mario. Oh the WII is now hackable!
Feb 11th
I read this yesterday via Slashdot regarding an Australian man who leaked the latest Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo Wii to the interwebs before the game was released. Check it out:
“A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites.”
So now that Nintendo did this publicly what do they hope to accomplish? Do they think they will actually see the 1.5 million dollars that this normal dude has to pay? Or did they alert THE WORLD to the fact that you do not have to pay for Nintendo WII games? The system has been hacked a long while ago but I did not think that was common knowledge – guess what?
It is now! What do you think? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments. Does this make you scared to download torrents or hack your hardware? Not Us over here!
Ask The Admin Reviews: Host Gator
Feb 5th
Hey Kiddies, Commodore 64 here to bring another tidbit of good advice from all of us to all of you. Along with this tasty piece of techie goodness is a brief admin-ography of the history of AskTheAdmin.com. We’ve come a long way folks, and we think we’ve finally found the true nexus point of our platform needs.
HostGator!
If you’ve been following us throughout the years, you’ve probably experienced the growing pains we’ve had moving from platform to platform, host to host. Our humble beginnings on Blogger dealing with all the limitations and WYSIWYG inconsistencies, then our HUGE fiasco getting our posts, media, and comments migrated, exported, and sometimes even re-written from scratch and re-imported one by tedious one.
Following the imports to our now defunct web host, Bansal-Inc, we were plagued with outages, server errors, php errors, unexpected reboots, files disappearing (wtf?) and older versions re-appearing (seriously now, WTFluck). It was like something out of The Twilight Zone with the title of “Ghost in the Machine.” It was utter chaos.
On top of all the server-side issues, I’d like to spend a minute to mention how far WordPress has come as a platform as well as an all around user experience from front to back.
Back then, around version 2.5 or 2.6, the WYSIWYG was HORRIBLE. Having already spent many years in the field of front-end web development, the amount of “code rewriting” and “automatic formatting” that went on was horrible. Mixed into that was the advent of Windows Livewriter, which in my opinion, was too good of an editing tool to be justifiably paired with a crappy, built-in, wordpress wysiwyg from back then.
Essentially what would end up happening is that in a writers role, it wasn’t half bad. You said your peace, did a little formatting and published. But from an editor’s perspective – re-opening a post and simply switching from HTML view to Visual view would change the code drastically: replacing massive amounts of tags and flucking up all bullet points and various other elements. Aside from editing issues, plugins we were utilizing were crashing the site here and there. I remember there being a lot of fear associated with running a well-trafficked site in our situation, as it was.
Reaching out to tech support, especially when it’s overseas, was painful at best. Response times, even when they were responding, took days sometimes. We ended having to fish through our emails and find the email address of the company owner. It was only then we could get something done.
Just when we thought our problems were over… the company got sold to a web hosting service then called Inspirit Networks. We had a decent run with Inspirit. At first they were eager to please. But as time went on (we’re talking months, not years) the servers and support’s response times were getting worse and more unresponsive with each passing week. Ultimately we suffered major outages for days at a time which also seemed to strangely roll back our files to older versions. This was the last straw.
After major shopping around and considerations we decided on HostGator. The reviews were all good, and after testing their US based voice support lines, as well as chat lines we were thoroughly impressed.
Enter HostGator…
So far I’ve been personally using them for about a year now with no issues, and so far %100 uptime. Utilizing a free service called aremysitesup.com, I’ve been able to see that we have had NO DOWNTIME. The cpanel has all the options I’ve ever needed or wanted in a LAMP hosting account. We are currently running 8 different well trafficked blogs on one hosting account and see no slowdown and no issues. Truthfully, I’ve never been accustomed to being this fear-free and comfortable with my web server.
These days we can spend our time concentrating on publishing quality content rather than keeping our sites running and healthy.
Edit: We now have our own coupon discount code at Gator, which means we can pass along a savings of $9.94 off of your initial purchase with Gatorhost.
Use discount code “asktheadmin” to get your discount today!
This is commodore64 signing off.
Let us know what your web hosting experiences were in the comments below…
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Have you seen Digg’s source code recently?
Feb 4th
Check out http://www.digg.com and then click view source from your browser and you will see this:
Continue scrolling and you will see a URL for some sort of scary video game. Unbelievable! Where will they advertise next in your urinal water? Thanks Commodore!
