Nov 28
How-To Guides David
remove hardware, unmount, windows
Make your own “Safely Remove Hardware” shortcut (Windows)
Hopefully you know that when you’re using things like external drives that you should click the “Remove safely” icon from your system tray, before you unplug them. You do know that don’t you? Well, thanks to the eternal strangeness of Windows, sometimes that icon isn’t available in the system tray. So, make your own!
Create a shortcut, anywhere you like to the following DLL file:
%windir%\system32\RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
A good place to put the shortcut is either in your QuickLaunch bar or somewhere off of the Start menu.
Nov 26
How-To Guides David
extensions, firefox, privacy, security
Following on from last week, this is my top five security & privacy extensions for Firefox.
Without further ado:
- Adblock Plus
If you annoyed by adverts all over your web page, this will block them out. This may be something of a controversial one because many website owners say they depend on adverts to keep their sites going. I have two things to say that. First, if you’re blocking ads and really like a particular site; send them a donation. Second, from a security point of view, I see most web ad’s as vulnerable avenues of attack.
- Close n Forget
By installing the Close n Forget button on your toolbar, you can close the current tab you’re on, along with deleting all of its related cookies and history entries. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but it’s worth having.
- CookieSafe
This is an extension to prevent web sites from saving cookies on your system. Are able to set site by site permissions, and particularly good, you can block third party cookies.
- FlashBlock
This extension will provide embedded Flash objects from being loaded into your page. Instead all you see if a place holder with the Flash icon. If you want to see the Flash object, just click on the place holder and it’ll load in as it was intended. This is particularly handy for sites like Myspace where people have music blasting out as soon as you arrive on their profile page.
- NoScript *****
If you install no other Firefox extension, you should install this one. This one will protect you from malicious JavaScripts and other exploits such as “ClickJacking“. It does cause some inconvenience for you, much like CookieSafe, you approve sites on a site by site basis. Therefore, some sites may not work with this active because they rely on Javascript for formating and general function. It’s easy to allow sites to run Javascript though. I think think the inconvenience is worth the security. Given that these days we don’t have to worry so much about old-fashioned viruses and more about “drive by downloads” from malicious websites, NoScript becomes your first line of defence.
Nov 24
How-To Guides David
back up, decryption, encryption, freedos, hard drive, maintenance, password, repair, rsync, spinrite, syncback, synchronise, Tech, thumb drive, truecrypt, usb
Introduction
This is a series showing you how you can load up a basic USB thumb drive with some practical tools which will ensure you can keep your data safe from theft and hard drive failure.
Part 1
This USB drive has become a powerful tool for me. It holds an encrypted back up all of my irreplaceable data and it can repair my hard drive in the event of failure.
For back up, I just do a simple “synchronisation” of files. I use a Windows program called “Syncback”, but you could just as easily use any other synchronisation/backup program, such as the open-source “rsync”. I simply plug in the USB drive, start up Syncback and run my backup profile. Files that have either been created or updated since the last backup are copied on to the drive and files that have been deleted are also deleted from the USB drive. You could argue this lacks sophistication, although I prefer the lack of complication. If I’m working on something I want chronological versions of, I’ll create chronological versions myself – it’s all in my control. (Although, I will admit that since I first wrote this, I started using an on-line back up service as an added layer of protection, and that does take chronological versions of files as I they are edited.)
Something to consider, this is only a 4GB drive, and all my irreplaceable data only takes up 2.7GB (so far). This doesn’t sound much, but I’m being very minimalist. You know when you’re moving house you start to wonder how you amassed so much stuff that you never use or think about? Be honest, you do don’t you? Well what you accrue on your hard drive is much the same. So if you want to be able to get all your stuff on such a drive then you need to have a ruthless clear out of your personal data. Note that I’m not including music here. If it comes to it, you can buy and/or download replacements of your music, you can’t do that for all those photos of your friends and family.
Now, if you get in to a routine of doing this simple back up, what if you lost the drive? You then have two problems: how could anyone return it to you and what about your privacy?
For identifying yourself as the owner, you can do the following. Create an “autorun.inf” file on the root directory of my drive (yes, this is a Windows thing, sorry). I then used the “label” command to show my e-mail address. To do this, you’d write a line in thie autofun.inf file (it’s a text file so only use notepad or similar): “label=email@somedomain.com”. In the “My Computer” window, your e-mail address will show in place of the drive letter. You can find even more tips about how your lost drive can identify it’s owner at this post on Daily Cup of Tech.
For your privacy you need to encrypt your data, and the ideal choice is the open source & cross platofm encryption application, “TrueCrypt”. The simplest way of working with TrueCrypt is to create an encrypted “container file”, which TrueCrypt then mounts as a drive on your computer. When it comes to security there’s one constant rule – the more secure it is, the less convenient it is. So if we were to take the step of backing up onto an encrypted virtual drive, we’ve given ourselves some inconvenience. Believe me, if you don’t mind even more inconvenience, TrueCrypt can give you some real James Bond level privacy protection, but we’ll leave that for another day.
See part 2.
Nov 21
How-To Guides David
IM, instant messaging, meebo
Want to use an instant messenger, but you’re on some computer that doesn’t belong to you and you can’t install the right client software?
Then head over to Meebo.com. This is multi-protocol IM client that works on a web page in your browser. No need to install any software at all!
Also, from my tip yesterday about forcing a secure http connection, Meebo is one of the sites that offer this. So make sure you use https://www.meebo.com when you go there.
Nov 19
How-To Guides David
extensions, firefox, useful
If you’re not already using it, hopefully you’ll be aware of the Firefox web browser. One of it’s killer features is that you can add “extensions” to expand it’s functionality. For the next two weeks I’m going to post a list of extensions that I think you should use. This week, I’ll post up extensions I use that are just generally useful. Next week, I’ll post up extensions that are for your privacy and security.
Here we go with the useful Firefox extensions:
- DownThemAll!
This is a download manager for Firefox. Firstly, you selectively scrape all of the content from a page. Secondly, it also accelerates your downloads by using multiple threads.
- FoxClocks
This extension allows you select various locations around the world and display the local time for all those locations.
- FoxMarks
This extension allows you to back up your bookmarks remotely. They have also just added the same function for your Firefox password manager, although I haven’t yet decided if I’m comfortable using this. The best part of this is that when you’re away from home, you can access all of your bookmarks via a web interface (so you don’t need to be able to install the extension elsewhere to access your bookmarks).
- ImageZoom
This extension allows you to blow up an image (without altering text size). All you do is hover your cursor over an image, hold down the right button and roll your mouse wheel.
- Linkification *****
This is the one of the most modest yet everyday-useful extensions out there. Linkification will scan the page you’re on, looking for possible links, and will create hyperlinks on anything that hasn’t been already linked. This can save you a lot of time. For instance, if someone posts a web address without making it into a link, you have to copy & paste it to the URL bar (sorry, “Awesome Bar”). Linkification saves you this trouble by converting this to a hyperlink allowing you to simply click.
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