How Anonymous Are You?

April 17, 2008 – 8:39 AM

You may think that you are anonymous as you browse web sites, but pieces of information about you are always left behind. You can reduce the amount of information revealed about you by visiting legitimate sites, checking privacy policies, and minimizing the amount of personal information you provide.

What information is collected?

When you visit a web site, a certain amount of information is automatically sent to the site. This information may include the following:

• IP address – Each computer on the internet is assigned a specific, unique IP (internet protocol) address. Your computer may have a static IP address or a dynamic IP address. If you have a static IP address, it never changes. However, some ISPs own a block of addresses and assign an open one each time you connect to the internet—this is a dynamic IP address. You can determine your computer’s IP address at any given time by visiting http://www.showmyip.com/ 
• domain name – The internet is divided into domains, and every user’s account is associated with one of those domains. You can identify the domain by looking at the end of URL; for example, .edu indicates an educational institution, .gov indicates a US government agency, .org refers to organization, and .com is for commercial use. Many countries also have specific domain names. The list of active domain names is available from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). 
• software details – It may be possible for an organization to determine which browser, including the version, that you used to access its site. The organization may also be able to determine what operating system your computer is running. 
• page visits – Information about which pages you visited, how long you stayed on a given page, and whether you came to the site from a search engine is often available to the organization operating the web site.

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Supercharge Windows Vista’s Startup Time

April 17, 2008 – 5:09 AM

Windows Vista boots up quickly—but seeing the desktop is hardly a sign that the OS is ready for use. When your familiar wallpaper and icons appear, you better not start clicking, because in the background the OS is still finishing up its startup process. Sometimes it seems like you have time to go watch an opera before Vista finally becomes responsive.Getting to the desktop quickly, but not being able to use it for another minute or so, is Vista’s big tease. The drive thrashes, icons don’t seem to respond to clicks, and if you manage to get a program to load it goes into the annoying Not Responding mode if you dare try to use it.

Outside of the operating system, during the POST, there are built-in BIOS options to speed up that portion of the bootstrap. Quick boot. Quiet boot. Fast memory checking. But once the operating system takes over, it’s all Vista, and it seems that the more applications you install, the longer the window of time from powering up the PC to being graced with a responsive GUI becomes.

There are a few steps you can take to cut down on the hard drive churning, semi-responsive purgatory that Vista foists upon you before it lets you use it. First, let’s look at the root cause.

Why Does it Take So Long?

Like Windows operating systems before it, Vista runs all kinds of routines in the background even while you do whatever it is you do with the GUI. Some of the code Windows loads up is called services; these are bits of software that facilitate activities that you might wish to engage in during your Vista session. Others are higher-level applets called processes that tend to be more dynamic than services; processes are instances of programs that the computer is actually running.

When Windows Vista boots up, it struggles to show you the desktop right away, but in the background it’s loading processes and starting services, and both actions eat up resources. They load from the hard drive, they eat up processor cycles, and they take up precious system memory.

Because Windows Vista optimizes itself to store the most-executed code on the fastest and most accessible portion of the hard drive, the load time can theoretically decrease with regular usage. Unfortunately, that notion is defeated by actual, realistic usage. As you install programs, many of them come with their own services or start their own processes on bootup. Before long, Windows Vista demands a solid two minutes of your time from the moment you push the power button until the OS becomes useable.

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MySpace Hack Reveals Profile Visitors

April 17, 2008 – 5:06 AM

A security problem with MySpace has the potential to botch up law-enforcement efforts to track bad actors on the social-networking site.

An increasing number of MySpace profiles contain a few lines of code that automatically subscribe people to the profile’s video channel, said Chris Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Communications.

After the visitor has been added, the person running the profile can see the subscribers. For people who don’t abuse MySpace, the problem may not appear to be a huge deal, Boyd said.

But hackers often are running dozens of “puppet” MySpace accounts, which are used for a variety of malicious acts such as spamming or trying to vandalize other profiles, not for social networking, Boyd said.

So when a visitor is added, it’s a tip-off that someone could be tracking their movements in order to expose them for abusing MySpace, Boyd said.

Hackers “are using every trick in the book they can to know who is watching them,” said Boyd, who has posted more details on his blog.

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Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report

April 17, 2008 – 4:49 AM

Windows Vista shipped to business customers on the last day of November 2006, so the end of November 2007 marks the one year anniversary for supported production use of the product. This paper analyzes the vulnerability disclosures and security updates for the first year of Windows Vista and looks at it in the context of its predecessor, Windows XP, along with other modern workstation operating systems Red Hat, Ubuntu and Apple products. The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor. Analysis of security updates also shows that Microsoft improvements to the security update process and development process have reduced the impact of security updates to Windows administrators significantly compared to its predecessor, Windows XP.

Note that this report is an update to the previously published Windows Vista 90-Day Vulnerability Report and Windows Vista 6-Month Vulnerability Report. However, since one year is a more informative time frame, this report contains the results of a deeper level of analysis.

Click here to view the full report…

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Firefox 2.0.0.14 Released

April 16, 2008 – 7:59 PM

For those of you who are not trying out a BETA version of Firefox 3, version 2.0.0.14 has been released and can be downloaded from here.

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