Windows Tips and Tricks

Another email version of the Sober worm is becoming widespread. This one pretends it’s from the FBI or CIA. I shouldn’t need to say this but just delete any such message and do not try to open the attachment. It always surprises me how many people get taken in by this kind of thing but this one seems to be a fairly large outbreak. In part, it says “we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites” with a “list of questions” attached. The list is a worm.

Yesterday I mentioned the latest security problem with Internet Explorer and gave a reference for defending against the problem. This is the first of several pages on the subject of making IE safer. Another page in this group is at http://surfthenetsafely.com/ieseczone6.htm. Today, George Ou at ZDNet also has posted directions for disabling scripting in IE.

One of the less pleasant aspects of this technology driven age is the automation of help lines at many (most?) companies. Not only do you have to thread your way through a maze of button-pushing to get to the right subject when you telephone for help or information but you never actually get a real person when you finally arrive at the right button. You either get a recording or a voice-activated computer. I personally hate having to talk in a loud, painfully enunciated voice to a machine. Then the machine will answer the wrong question anyway.

Many companies do not even seem to have a telephone. They want you to direct all inquiries to their Web site. Going online is no solution, however, since all you get at many sites is a FAQ that only answers the most general questions, many of which any normal person would already know how to answer. Trying to email is no better. You either get no reply or a canned answer to a general question that you did not ask.

Fortunately, there exists a site that lists ways to obtain help from real people at a number of large companies. I spotted it in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal. The site is by Paul English. As of today, there are 111 different companies listed. These include Amazon (800-201-7575) and Verizon DSL. The Amazon number is a rare example of a line direct to a human being. The Verizon DSL number (800 567 6789) is more typical of the convolutions necessary to talk to a person. After calling you have to say “I don’t know it” followed by saying “technician”.

Warnings appeared today of a critical security hole in Internet Explorer. Apparently, Microsoft has been aware of the problem for some time but has issued no patch because they assumed that it was limited to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. However, Secunia reports

Benjamin Tobias Franz has discovered a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.

And Secunia adds

The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2, and Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4.

ZDNet reports today that

The exploit code, made public Monday, aims to take advantage of the “extremely critical” vulnerabilities in IE 5.5 and IE 6 running on XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), and IE 6 running on Windows 2000 SP4, security researcher Secunia said in advisory.

Once a PC user is tricked into visiting a malicious Web site, the exploit can be triggered automatically, without the user doing anything.

“An attacker could use the exploit to run any code they want to on a person’s system,” said Thomas Kristensen, Secunia’s chief technology officer. “It could be they want to launch some really nasty code on a user’s system.”

Regular users of IE should be very careful about which sites they go to. Until a patch is issued the only defense is to disable Active Scripting. Details on how to change IE setiings can be found at http://surfthenetsafely.com/surfsafely6.htm. Or you could just use Firefox or Opera or other browser.

Back in the year 2000, Steve Yandl at PC911 wrote a little script to add a spell check feature to the right-click context menu of Internet Explorer. I forgot about it until I ran across it again when I was cleaning out some old Windows 98 stuff from my hard drive. Although the script was written for Windows 98, all it does is add a Registry entry. Since many of the Registry keys are the same in Windows XP as in Windows 98, I decided to try it on Windows XP and it works there also. In order for it to work, you must have Microsoft Word installed since the spell checker from that application is what is being used. To apply it, you highlight a piece of text on a Web page and right-click. The context menu contains an entry “Spell” and when you select the entry it runs the spell checker from Word. Any corrections that you choose will be placed in the clipboard.

Judging from the number of spelling errors that I see all over the Internet, many computer users may not care that much about correct spelling. However, people like me who put stuff on the Internet or who participate in forums or use Web email may find it useful. The script is described and can be downloaded at this PC911 page. When you run the installation script, you may get the standard warning about using scripts from your ant-virus or anti-spyware programs.

The “Organize Favorites” function in IE is pretty primitive and can be a pain to use. It is much easier instead to open the Favorites folder directly and to do editing functions there. Since IE Favorite are just files, they can be moved, renamed, and deleted in the same way as any group of files. Also, new subfolders can be created for new categories. Favorites are buried in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\{current user}\Favorites, so accessing them can be tedious unless you use a shortcut. One quick way to get to the Favorites folder is to enter “favorites” in Start-Run (without the quotes). You can also create a shortcut as described here.

November seems to be the month for anniversaries. Not only does it mark the advent of Windows but it is also the month when the World Wide Web was born five years later. Here is Wikipedia on the origin:

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Information Management: A Proposal”, which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate information management system. [3] He published a more formal proposal for the actual World Wide Web on November 12, 1990 [4]. Implementation began on November 13, 1990 when Berners-Lee wrote the first Web page [5] on a NeXT workstation.

Old men reminiscing are boring so I will confine myself to expressing my sense of wonder at how the World Wide Web has affected lives and society everywhere. As more people get broadband, there will be even more changes, especially if we all get the really high speeds that are imminently possible. Combined with wireless and the ever increasing power and miniaturization of hardware, the possibilities are mind-boggling.

It is now 20 years since the first Windows operating systen came out. For those who are interested in some of the history of this system that now monopolizes the PC, the Desktop Pipeline has a series of articles. Here is an excerpt:

Since 1985, we’ve lived through more than 15 major releases of the operating system we love, love to hate, or just plain hate — often simultaneously. This retrospective begins with an exploration of the controversy and decision-making process leading up to the release of Windows 1.0.

Next, we’ll explore, celebrate, and mourn the highs and lows of subsequent releases of Windows over the last 20 years. We’ll take a look at the Windows timeline in the context of computing and world events, followed by a quick look at the future of Windows.

PC World has more on what went on at the conference in Tunisia that dealt with the question of Internet governance. It seems that how you interpret the results depends on who you are.

Both the U.S. and the European Union are claiming victory in an agreement reached over Internet governance, viewed as one of the most contentious issues being debated at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) here this week.

The only problem is, both parties still remain at the opposite ends of the Internet governance debate. While the U.S. interprets the agreement to give it continued control over the Internet’s core components, including its addressing systems, the E.U. reads it to open the door for Internet oversight to be shared by governments of the world.

As much as we might wish to continue US supervision of the Internet, it seems clear that sooner or later other countries are going to want a bigger role in something as internationally significant as the Internet. I just hope that our government will have enough diplomatic savvy to satisfy the inevitable pressure for participation by other countries while countering the move to censorship and other undesirable aspects of control that are bound to come from many countries. As China has shown, governments can put censorship in place whether we like it or not, but let us at least try to keep the basic structure and governance of the Internet as free as possible from political and religious strictures.

Unfortunately, I am not very sanguine about the long-term prospects. The diplomatic clumsiness of the current administration in Washington and the ugly trends at work in the world are not promising.

The new operating system called Vista that Microsoft will be releasing next year will have a lot of new security and maintenance features. You can try out some of these at a new Microsoft site. Here is the description:

Windows Live Safety Center is a new, free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.

* Check for and remove viruses
* Learn about threats
* Improve your PC’s performance
* Get rid of junk on your hard disk

Note that this site is a beta version so everything may not be as polished as in a final release.
This site was mentioned in the LangaList