The Legacy Sunbelt Software Blog
The Great Years: 2004-2010
McAfee just bought SiteAdvisor. I think this is a smart move, although to be honest, I’m surprised that one of the large search engines didn’t buy the company. It would have been an ideal way to assure safer surfing.
While terms were not disclosed, I would venture to guess that the deal was probably in the range of $15–$20 million (that is pure speculation on my part).
I like SiteAdvisor and recommend it. McAfee made a good move here.
Link here.
Alex Eckelberry
I’ve written about this subject before, and today there was an article in the WSJ yesterday on the same thing: Ads showing up in places the advertisers really don’t want them:
Glitches have occurred for mundane reasons. The Christian Children’s Fund bought ads on the largest online ad network, Advertising.com, which is owned by AOL, and specified that the ads not appear near any provocative content. But Advertising.com says it mistakenly turned off its content filters for an unspecified period of time last month, and the Christian Children’s Fund ad ended up next to an article about a sexual position in the sex section of About.com, which is owned by New York Times Co. The Disney ads were also placed by Advertising.com on About.com’s sex section during that time.
Alex Eckelberry
The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, today announced that it had sued Direct Revenue, perhaps the most notorious and hated adware/spyware distributor of them all.
Press release:
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2006/apr/apr04a_06.html
Affirmation of Justin Brookman:
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2006/apr/Direct%20Revenue%20Affirmation%20of%20Justin%20Brookman.pdf
Petition:
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2006/apr/Direct%20Revenue%20Verified%20Petition.pdf
The Brookman Affirmation (76 pages) is a hair-raising read in which OAG investigators document the reprehensible software installation and pop-up advertising practices of Direct Revenue. Still more damning, though, is the avalanche of internal email that OAG investigators quote, revealing that DR execs were not only well aware of the fact that most users did not meaningfully consent to the installation of their software and had no clue as to how to remove the software from their systems, but that they knew full well that DR’s distributors and sub-distributors were engaged in illegal installation practices and yet took no actions to stop those practices or police the distributors (at least not until OAG investigators were on the case).
Also of interest is the fact that DR execs obsessively monitored anti-spyware web sites, organizations, and companies for any sign of criticism and were not shy about issuing legal threats and, in one case, hiring a private investigator to bully critics into silence. The Brookman Affirmation acidly remarks:
Yet the individual respondents became blase even about the shame of operating one
of the most reviled companies in America. Forwarding a critical Information Week
article, one of the company’s venture capital partners cavalierly noted, “At
least we’re not Ebola.”
To those of us who have followed the outrageous practices of this company over the years, there is little here that is completely new. What is remarkable, though, is that we now have an account of these practices all under one cover and thoroughly documented using internal company sources.
Highly recommended reading.
Eric L. Howes
Director of Malware Research
Sunbelt Software
“Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close”
If you get a message that says IE has encountered a problem and needs to close, it may be because you need to update the Pdm.dll file. Or you can work around the problem by disabling script debugging. For information on both solutions, see KB article 293623 here.
How to Enable Audible Caps Lock Warning
It’s easy to hit the Caps Lock key by mistake and find yourself typing in capital letters. Worse, if you don’t know Caps Lock is on, your password may be rejected for no apparent (to you) reason. You can use the built-in ToggleKeys feature to sound an audible warning when you hit Caps Lock, Num Lock or Scroll Lock. Here’s how:
How to Manually Start the Process to Remove XP
If you want to remove Windows XP from your computer but you can’t start the operating system in Normal or Safe mode, you can manually start the removal process by using a startup disk for an earlier operating system such as Windows 98 or Me. For step by step instructions on how to do so, see KB article 312569 here.
Use Group Policy Editor to Manage Local Computer Policy
You can use Group Policies in Windows XP to create configuration settings for specific user accounts or for the computer by editing or creating Group Policy Objects. These include registry-based policies, security options, software installation, scripts options and folder redirection configurations. To do this, you use the Group Policy Editor tool while logged on with an administrative account. To find out how to use the Group Policy Editor, see KB article 307882 here.
Computer Doesn’t Shut Down Properly if Selective Suspend is Enabled
If your computer no longer shuts down correctly (for example, it hangs after you select Restart or Turn Off) when you’ve attached a USB mouse, keyboard or other input device, this may be because selective suspend is enabled and the device doesn’t support this feature. There are a couple of workarounds for this problem. To find out more about them, see KB article 315664 here.
How to Change the Windows Logon Screensaver
When you start Windows, if you don’t click a user name on the Welcome screen or press CTRL+ALT+DEL to log on if prompted, after ten minutes the default Windows logon screensaver will start. You can change this logon screensaver by editing the registry. Here’s how:
Note that if the screensaver file is stored in a location other than the System32 folder, you must type the entire path in the Value Data field.
How to View and Remove Installed Updates
Want to see which updates have been installed on your system? Suspect a recent update is causing your crashes or other problems and want to remove it? Here’s how:
How to recover from a corrupted registry
If your Windows XP computer won’t boot because of corruption in the registry, you may get an error message that says XP can’t start because a specified file is missing or corrupt, or you may get a Registry File Failure stop message (c0000218). You can use the recovery console to back up your registry files, delete the existing registry and use the repair folder files to boot into XP with a clean set of registry files. The step-by-step process is described in KB article 307545 here.
Can’t access CD-ROM after removing Easy CD Creator
Some folks have discovered that after they remove the Easy CD Creator software from their computers, they can no longer access the CD-ROM drive and get various error code messages. To fix the problem, you may need to modify the registry. For instructions, see KB article 314060 here.
And a final bonus: Transl8 Txt Msgs
Befuddled by the seemingly foreign language in which your kids communicate on their cell phone SMS service? Wanting to get started with text messaging yourself but don’t know all those abbreviations that everyone uses? Here’s a web site that will help you to “make sense of txt lingo.” You can either type in the SMS message and the site will translate it to plain English, or type in your message in English and the site will spit out its SMS equivalent. Link here.
Deb Shinder
I’ve been a wee bit light on the blogging lately. Truth is, I took my family out of town on a vacation last week and tomorrow I’m going to InfoSec with a number of other Sunbelters.
In the meantime, Eric Howes and Eric Sites here at Sunbelt have been holding down the Blogging Fort, and occasionally, others jump in here as well to post a quick note.
I hope to be back in the swing of things toward the end of the week.
Alex Eckelberry
A story in the Guardian today brings up some very interesting tidbits about the widespread use of CCTV in England, whose citizens are the most watched in the world.
The complete ubiquity of these cameras has signaled the end of any sense of privacy for British citizens.
From the article:
“But what if this impeccably liberal Observer journalist wanted to sneak out and buy a copy of the Sun or Nuts magazine so I could look at pictures of girls in their pants without anyone knowing? Or slack off to KFC to load up on the Colonel’s fat-and-carb combo, as a little light relief from the prissy platefuls I have to swallow as a restaurant critic? These aren’t criminal acts, but they are things I might not wish anybody to know about. And yet I probably couldn’t get away with them today because somewhere there will be a camera watching me. I suddenly feel like my private space has shrunk and that the Great British Public has allowed it to happen. And I want to know why.”
But at what cost? Doesn’t even seem to stop crime:
“…a major survey of 14 CCTV schemes published last year showed their impact on local crime rates was either negligible or that crime rates actually went up. At the same time fear of crime has also gone up. Meanwhile, clear-up rates – the number of crimes that the police solve – have gone down.”
There’s even a a program to allow everyday people to subscribe to a special CCTV channel, for only a few pounds a week.
“To see the future of CCTV we need to go to Spitalfields in east London, where the Shoreditch Trust, a local regeneration agency, is piloting a new initiative: CCTV for the masses. Instead of the images only being seen by the likes of Norman Whalley and his team, local residents will be able to watch them, too, on a broadband connection.”
It’s justified as you won’t be able to do all the fun stuff the local cops can do (like pan, tilt, zoom, etc.). According to the article, it’s not “big brother”, it’s described as “little brother”.
Except that little brothers grow up.
Article link here.
Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Chris)
