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Once again, I am today posting links to a few recent (and not-so-recent too) interesting threads that I’ve created on “Ars Technica” forum (or participated in); this time I realized that there were so many threads about interesting things, so I chose a few of the most interesting ones. And as always, for other recent interesting threads on Ars Technica forums (and of course, on other forums too), please see the current “forum-posts-2.htm” file: http://esnips.com/doc/2c13f862-854a-450e-b54e-d5bb24aced90/f… note that I wrote “the current” because there is also one older such file containing links to the threads that I’ve created or participated in named “forum-posts-1.html”: http://esnips.com/doc/8bab788d-840a-4e0c-b36b-aeeeae902a2a/f… (they are nicely sorted by forum and by date), while both are linked on each and every “events” page on my website.

As first, check out the related “Is there a way to get a part of a file from a CD/DVD with a “bad block” ??” thread: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/… if you want to; in it, there are numerous ways explained on how to deal with CD/DVD discs with “bad blocks”. Next, I just need to mention an this awesome Firefox trick related to animated GIFs (.gif format of graphics); the thing is that one just needs to hit the Escape key to stop these GIFs animating (btw. I’ve later found out that it works in Internet Explorer too); I think though that it works only on the current page/tab that one is on, and not on/through the whole window (instance of Firefox), i.e. all tabs + all windows or in other words for the one particular “firefox.exe” process. /UPDATE: Well, I’ve just thoroughly checked it, and it indeed work through the whole window, at least on the tabs tghat were already opened at the moment of hitting the Escape. If you want to, check out the related “Firefox. Arrrgh! Why! FFS!”: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/… thread, in particular this Happysin’s post: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/… optionally also see the expresses of gratitude below from other users beside me of course) that also didn’t know for it to that very moment. And note that I opened threads with this particular trick on “CastleCops”, “PC Pitstop”, and “Winforums” websites/forums.

Further, you know that in the meantime, I was in fact “infected” ( an unintentionallyy of course, as a result of my experiemnts) with a trojan-horse called “Haxdoor”? For more details, please see the “/Fixed: HELP: My computer was probably infected and now I am afraid to reboot” thread: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/… also on “Ars Technica” forum, and My PC was probably infected and now I am afraid to reboot”: http://www.castlecops.com/postitle164628-0-0-.html on “CastleCops” forum; as you can see, I later added the “/Fixed:” note to both threads’ titles. I really recommend you to read it, it’s a really interesting thread, full of details posted on infection specifics and techniques to handle it, like how to hunt down that non-existant dll file, to find the non-visible processes etc. Anyway, it has all started whent I got that spam e-mail message with the obvious virus/worm “z3566043.zip” attachment. But the problem with me is that I like to “examine” that sorts of things, and so I un-zipped the “z3566043.exe” executable contained in it, and first look at it in binary viewer, then executed it as a “limited user” etc. etc.; of course, with Filemon and Regmon running all the time so that I could revert any changes made. Then only CastleCops message-board, I’ve opened a quite popular “Do we need an outbound traffic monitoring firewall ??”: http://castlecops.com/p826416-.html (or alternative three links: http://www.castlecops.com/posts165221-0.html, http://www.castlecops.com/postitle165221-0-0-.html, http://www.castlecops.com/t165221-Do_we_need_an_outbound_tra…), that deals with the question, do we need the outbound-traffic monitoring firewalls at all, since as said many times by many people on Ars Technica, once the malware is on your computer you are already owned and that the malware could in turn turn-off your firewall (and/or anti-virus program), and additionally disable the “Security Center” built-into Windows altogether. However, although I think that this is true (i.e. that it certainly could turn-off the protection programs), I also think that there is too a possibility that it wouldn’t, since there are so many different firewall-programs out there, that it’s almost impossible to “target” them all.

And as the last thread worth being mentioned here (although there are verious others that are interesting too), please visit the “Very strange “problems” with Psexec” thread: http://www.sysinternals.com/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6049&a… that I opened on “Sysinternals” forum. Although it is not “directly” related, it does describe the way I use Psexec commandline interface program from Sysinternals. You see, originally I’ve read that Mark Russinovich’s article regarding running applications as a “limited user”, but I wanted to go further than launching programs from Process Explorer’s “Run as Limited User…” menu, so I was totally amused when I read about the ability of using the Psexec for that. And so I’ve decided to “convert” all of my program-launching batch-files to use the Psexec program instead of the START command; actually the one thread linked above describe some of the problems with conversion (presumably caused by Notepad and it’s handling of the characters; if I recall correctly LFs and CRs to be precise), but in the end I managed to discover the reason for most of the errors/problems.

P.S. - I am just letting you all know that I will soon (meaning today, maybe even right away after I finish writing/formatting it) post a second part of this “serie” of two “blog-entries” related to my computer, and stuff, and following one another.

Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)

/edited: 11.10.2007 (fixed an error in referral link)
/edited: 14.03.2007 (a minor fix in BBCode)

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