www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQuXxOBJwSg

This handy feature allows you to carry password, user form, add ons, extensions and bookmarks.

Often we buy new storage device and plugin to some of our very important systems (PC or server or notebook) thinking it to be totally safe since its a brand new device. How ever a recent news may send scare through any IT professional working with a system having sensitive data or information.

An Australian film maker Darryl Mason, bought a new hard drive from a well known Australian departmental brand Dick Smith. The reason for purchase was to back up video footage of his upcoming films from his laptop. The data was very sensitive and precious in terms of effort was put in to shoot, hence he never connected the laptop to any other storage or to Internet to prevent any malware infection or such.

However to his utter surprise, he found the new hard drive already had few Pirated Movies and after connecting the hard disk, his laptop is reporting file corruption with many of his videos and files indicating presence of possible malware in the device.

Read in Details -> Exposed: ‘new’ Dick Smith hard drive full of pirated movies

It should be warring to all IT professional and home users too. Never to trust even a new device. Always pre-scan the device before plugging it to an important system if there is no security software present in that.

Tip for home users

Malware protection is not that costly by the way. Microsoft offers a real time scanner called Security Essential for free to all Windows users.

Download is simple, easy to use (infact all it needs is installation and it works in background) and update. Comes with real time scanner to protect the system for unwanted infections and very light weight on system resources too.

Microsoft Security Essentials -> http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/mse.aspx

Gamers in Need for Speed World can spend USD 100 to own an exclusive machine.

Gamers will notice a few firsts in NFS World, when they feast their eyes on the stenciled logos on the front windshield and also the burnt titanium exhaust tips!

This virtual super car is up for sale for a physical $100 in Need for Speed World.

http://world.needforspeed.com/intro

Hollywood studios & the movie making companies are the top lobbyiest in the process bringing making file sharing practice under fire and stronger piracy law. Many Torrent tracker and such websites have suffered big personal loss via this process.

In order to show how guilty the law makers them self are, Torrent tracker TorrentFreak.com published an article showing proof of many leading Hollywood studios downloading pirated content them self.

A service called youhavedownloaded.com was used to track certain IP address belonging to major HollyWood studios to check their past history in file sharing. Result is surprising since the record shows how deeply the law makers them self are involved in breaking the law.

Often its quite hard to figure out that how many other website is ran by a particular a website owner or blogger, specially if the said person wishes to stay anonymous.

eWhoIS uses an interesting method to cross reference websites using Google Analytics or Adsense publisher ID to match and figure out the similar websites.

Most of the website owners of bloggers uses single Google adsense or  analytics account to monitor or monetize their website, and eWhoIS takes advantage of this for Reverse Adsense ID Lookup and Reverse Google Analytics ID Lookup.

In the above example, I have done an eWhoIS on a popular Windows news and discussion website WinVistaClub.com to find out what other website is ran by the owner of WinVistaClub.com. The tool detected and reported a list of 5 other website using the same adsense / analytics account.

Skype now supports integration with Facebook with its latest version.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO5GbYHv7HM

Download Skype -> http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/

Microsoft today have lost control over their main YouTube channel and it seems that the attacker have managed to delete all videos to replace them with couple of pranks.

YouTube.com/Microsoft

The channel page looks like this (taken as screenshot)

No official statement from any of the side, YouTube or MS is yet to comment how ever the big question comes now is whom to blame for the mishap ?

• Is it a MS employee losing credential to some spoof or phishing attack
• or may be MS computer got infected with malware to lose the credential from there
• or the big question of some security laps at YouTube’s end, which allowed the attacker to exploit and compromise the account

Build has started the Microsoft just made the Windows 8 dev preview public to all. The OS with developer tool is now available for download via MSDN and the download is public.

Please find the direct download links below

Main Page -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/

Download x86 (32bit) -> Download (Windows Developer preview x86)

Download x64 (64bit) -> Download (Windows Developer preview x64)

]]> http://www.chotocheeta.com/2011/09/15/microsoft-windows-8-dev-preview-direct-download-links-are-now-public/feed/ 0 http://www.chotocheeta.com/2011/07/06/internet-explorer-is-it-really-that-bad/ http://www.chotocheeta.com/2011/07/06/internet-explorer-is-it-really-that-bad/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:33:00 +0000 Choto Cheeta http://www.chotocheeta.com/?p=2537

It is nothing new that we come across to web articles about why not to use Internet Explorer and how much better another alternate browser is. One such story I was reading today at Computer world about 12 reasons on why not to use Internet Explorer. While I was reading, the points kept me thinking that most of them are valid for those so called safe options (alternate browsers) also.

Point 1

You are safer by avoiding software that bad guys target. Mac users benefited from this for years. Windows users can lower their attack surface (be less vulnerable) by avoiding popular software. Internet Explorer is popular, so bad guys exploit known problems with the browser. No thanks.

• 100% true that bad guys targets those which are used by mass.
• Google Chrome and FireFox both based are on same Mozilla platform retains around 35% market shared between them.
• These two browsers are used by power users compare to IE, which are mostly in school / college / public PC and corporate world where they run their own software.

So if Internet Explorer is targeted because of its audience, so would be the Mozilla platform too because of the market share and more importantly the percentage of power users on active use.

Point 2

Microsoft fixes bugs in Internet Explorer on a fixed schedule. But, bugs are not discovered on a schedule which means IE users remain vulnerable to know bugs until the next scheduled bug fix roll-out. Neither Firefox or Chrome, my preferred browsers, are locked into a schedule.

Well the point is not entirely true, for security products, Microsoft does release important security updates irregularly too.

But mostly the update comes on Patch Tuesday. Why ?? Read more on Wiki about the choice behind this schedule -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday

Point 3

In addition, I get the feeling that Microsoft is just slow in fixing Internet Explorer bugs. The last release of IE patches included a fix to a bug that Microsoft had been told about six months ago.

Well unlike the author I don’t have a specific link, but Let’s Google for “unpatched safari” or another browser name. Plenty of examples are there for most of the browsers for being late on providing fix, in some case like Safari, two years late..

Point 4

The topic of bugs in popular software brings Adobe’s Flash Player to mind. Internet Explorer users with Flash enabled in their browser get notified of new versions of Flash using a very flawed system. And, when they are notified, they need to manually install the new version of Flash.

In this day and age, this is not acceptable; Flash is too popular and too buggy. Firefox fails here too. As I wrote about recently, I only use Flash from within Chrome which automatically, quickly and quietly updates the Flash player.

I don’t have to contradict, as author here him self have shown, not just IE, but FireFox too suffers the said problem.

Point 5

And speaking of Flash, it exists in Internet Explorer as an ActiveX control. The lack of security in ActiveX is what prompted me to jump on the Firefox bandwagon even prior to version 1.0.

ActiveX may be locked down a bit more than it used to be, but how many Internet Explorer users understand the security related prompts about running an ActiveX control, let alone the configuration options for ActiveX? To me, a browser that doesn’t support ActiveX is safer.

• Browser is not the problem here, the user is, as the browser would operate as the user would like it to be.
• The default settings are no way unsafe and while allowing active X, user can easily verify whether it is Adobe or some one else trying to deliver a rogue Flash module !!!
• Also check out Authors own point number 10, FireFox or Chrome “Extensions can spy on you”

Point 6

ActiveX was the first approach to extending browsers with extra features and functions. Now, both Firefox and Chrome have a huge number of available extensions. Internet Explorer has only a handful.

Talking about extensions, here is an interesting read -> http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/itdojo/video-firefox-extension-vulnerabilities-may-increase-malware-risk/1662

Extensions are not that safe compare to ActiveX as we think..

Point 7

Buggy browser extensions/plugins are often targeted by bad guys. Both Firefox and Chrome do some checking for outdated extensions. Internet Explorer does none. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote

The author already pointed out that internet explorer does the thing with ActiveX controllers.

Point 8

The most popular operating systems are, I believe, Windows XP, Windows 7 and OS X. Of these, the latest version of Internet Explorer, version 9, runs on only one. Many people use more than one computer and are likely to deal with more than one operating system. Firefox and Chrome provide a cross-platform experience (including Linux) that Internet Explorer does not.

The OS in talk, like Windows XP is already out of Microsoft support schedule secondly, not supporting OS X is more like a business decision compare to a technical down side.

The said point is a subjective example, valid for non Windows users.

Point 9

And, if you use multiple computers, both Firefox and Chrome have built-in features to synchronize bookmarks and more between different instances of the browser. Internet Explorer (at least up to version can’t do this.

Let’s check out Windows Live Mesh -> http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh?os=other

Not to mention, if you Google, you get hundreds of results on how to easily sync your book mark between computers.

Point 10

On Windows, I am a huge fan of portable applications, Windows programs that can run without first being installed. There are portable versions of both Firefox and Chrome. There is no portable version of Internet Explorer. A portable application is totally self-contained, which lets you have multiple installed copies that are totally independent of each other.

In terms of browsers, you could use one copy of a portable browser to test new extensions. Or, since extensions can potentially spy on you, have a copy of your browser with no extensions at all for online banking. Or, kick the tires on a new version of your browser, while still having the old version available. Or, multiple people sharing the computer can have their own copy of the browser with their own favorite extensions and modifications.

And, of course, you can move or copy a portable browser to a USB flash drive or another Windows machine. When you do, your favorite extensions come along, as do any tweaks you may have made to the user interface.

Perhaps the best thing about portable applications is that you can back them up before making changes. Backing up an application is something Windows has never offered.

If Internet Explorer starts acting funny, you’ve got a hassle ahead, potentially a big one. If a portable browser breaks, just delete the folder where its stored and fall back to the last backup. All that’s involved is copying a folder.

One thing I fail to understand is why would I need a browser to be a portable app ? It is a free software and Internet Explorer is an integrated part of Windows, thus making it available in any Windows PC (Yes, I know about Windows N and feature remove, above statement is for general purpose)

Author’s main need in point 10 is trial and error, for that, We have virtualization. Where you can try out things safely and securely.

Point 11

Anyone running a 64 bit version of Windows 7 may have to deal with the confusion over 32 and 64 bit versions of Internet Explorer. There is no such confusion with Chrome and Firefox.

So ? FF and Chrome doesn’t have a 64bit version. Is it a good side or bad side ?? I thought 64bit is the way ahead, is not it ??

While talking about confusion, please try to download IE9 and you would see MS download instruction would clearly detect your OS and its version (via browser) and would offer you the right download link. Even if it fails to detect (when approaching from an unsupported platform) it would through up warning with help and guide to determinate your OS and right IE version for you.

Point 12

The main competition to Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, are free. So too is Opera.

Let’s rethink, the said point is valid for only those, who would buy a Windows OS just to use Internet Explorer since IE is free with any Windows installation.

Conclusion

No, I am not a fan boy for IE. I like FF, I like Opera too, but the way some time IE is said to be bad is not right.

The browsers, FF / Chrome / Opera and yes IE also are safer than we think, it is us, users who end up doing the mistake to open up the door way for malware to exploit.

All it takes to be and surf safe is read the warning and follow the process what the browser is asking. Just a few seconds to verify the URL in which you are in, or few seconds to verify the certificate, that is it. If we fail to follow these simple steps, no matter which browser we run, we will end up being exploited !!!

DNS services helps to translate a domain name like ChotoCheeta.com to its IP address, which takes the user to the desired website and its content. Through out these years, ICANN was the sole body approve domain extension and allow certain registrars to issue the domain names to end users but that is about to chance.

ICANN is about pass a rule via which they would open up this area and would allow end user to chose or create any domain extension of gTLD they wish. Meaning now you can book, domain.anything-you-want.

Some see this as a welcome move to help new business to grow but if thinking deeply in today’s unsafe internet world, this would just open the flood gates for the phishing attacks since there would be virtual unlimited ways to mimic a original domain.