Nowadays, many people use removable storage such as USB Drives, DVD/CDs, etc. Most of these, especially CD and DVDs have autorun files in the root directory, namely [autorun.inf].
They were originally created to benefit us, the end users by starting up and allowing us to use the removable storage from interactive menus, or used to startup quicker. However, the autorun file has now become a great means for cybercriminals to spread their spyware and viruses.
Autorun Eater is a great program that wipes suspicious [autorun.inf] files from removable storage to prevent .exe, .cmd, .vbs, etc. files from running automatically. The autorun.inf files are backuped to an inaccessible directory in case of false positives, which you can restore via the program.
Even when running this proggie, you should still have a realtime antivirus running, such as AVG. This is not an antivirus program! I repeat: This is not an antivirus program!
Features:
1. Scan and remove suspicious ‘autorun.inf’ files found in the root directory of drives, A-Z, in real-time
2. Hotkey enabled to toggle scan
3. Start, Stop or Pause scan
4. Scan priority(normal/high)
5. Scan results are logged
6. Add and remove from startup entr(ies)
So, we’ve all heard of and used Portable software before. I have even reviewed some of them on this blog. But what is the definition of “portable”? Many people consider portable software to be those that can be run from external media, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, etc.
So, here is my definition of “portable” (it’s very strict):
- Can be run from external media.
- Does not require installation.
- Does not depend on anything on the host PC, e.g. IE, .NET Framework or Java
- If it writes files to the host system, it must delete those files on program shutdown. (even if the app/PC crashes)
- It does not require adminstrative privileges to run (all right, so this rule should have it’s limits. You don’t expect a portable uninstaller to be able to run as User status.)
- Settings should be written to program folder instead of other places, e.g. registry or Application Data folder
Not many apps fulfil the above requirements, so the word portable is very less seen on this blog 
I have previously reviewed WOT (Web of Trust), a browser addon that identifies sites that are malicious by sheer power of the public. This time it’s AVG LinkScanner, which is completely different.
AVG LS does not rely on a blacklist of any sort, but it does an ultra-fast scan of the webpage you’re trying to browse. It shows up in search engine results of Bing, Yahoo and Google, just like Web of Trust.
To ensure safety in browsing, you should use both of them together. The developer’s description:
Search-Shield scans search results and places a safety rating next to each link, so you know where it’s safe to click.
Active Surf-Shield scans the page behind any link you click on or any web address you type into your browser. If the page is poisoned, it stops you from opening it. (This happens so quickly that you don’t even notice it.)
(image credit What’s On My PC)
AVG LinkScanner® is the most effective protection against poisoned web pages.
It’s the only product that scans every web page just before you get there in real time, so it can identify short-lived threats.
Scans the pages behind all the links you click or type into your browser.
Scans the results of web searches in Google, Yahoo! and MSN so you know whether a page is safe before clicking on it.
Uses the intelligence gathered by a global community of online threat detectors.
Analyzes individual pages rather than entire sites because single pages may be threatened.
It doesn’t rely solely on a blacklist of bad sites that can quickly go out of date.
It can’t be identified by poisoned web sites, so they can’t take evasive action.
It doesn’t rely on opinion – it looks at what’s really on the web page.
Compatible with current products from other major security brands, so you can continue to use your existing software with AVG LinkScanner®.
Runs silently in the background – you won’t notice it until a threat is detected.
Minimal use of system resources – it won’t slow down your computer.
Easy to install and run.
Protects you immediately without need of a system scan.
Automatically updates whenever a new threat is found.
It’s quick and easy to install.
It works unobtrusively in the background and doesn’t slow your PC down.
It works smoothly alongside other major brands of security software.
AVG Search Shield now supports search engines other than just Google, MSN and Yahoo! Only dangerous, suspicious, or unknown links will be ranked; all unmarked links have been checked and found to be safe.
It’s completely free.
Works with most popular Windows OS including Win2k, XP, Vista (32 & 64 bit) and Internet Explorer (6.0+) and Firefox (2.0+) browsers.
Verdict: Great browser addon; use alongside WOT to ensure complete browsing safety!
Version Tested: 1.0
Compatibility: Windows 2000 or above with Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari or Opera.
Download: http://linkscanner.avg.com/index.html
[Via What's On My PC]
“Is my Blog working?” (IMBW) is a service that checks whether a website is down or not on their own servers. You can easily use this to find out whether the problem is on your side or on the server’s side when you cannot access a website.
For example, you cannot access Freeware Elite. Now, you type in Freeware Elite’s url into the main page of IMBW. (Click on the images to make them larger)
Then click “Check” at the right of the url. The results will be shown in usually less than 10 seconds.
If the page says that your blog is working, but you cannot access it, then it’s your problem. You can try using another browser or disconnecting and connecting again.
NOTE: This does not work for non-blog sites. (Example below, Google is working at the time of screenshot)
Compatibility: All major browsers on any operating system.
Go to http://www.ismyblogworking.com/ to start checking!
There are a lot of dangers in P2P file sharing. Firstly, your confidential documents might get spread over the internet easily; Secondly, most P2P songs, movies, games, etc. are illegal. The ThreatFire Research Blog collarborates more on the topic of Limewire in a July 09 article.
http://blog.threatfire.com/2009/07/p2p-file-sharing-and-limewire.html
In another “duh!” moment, it was discussed that government workers and contractors probably should not be sharing their drive contents using P2P software. In a recent hearing, U.S. lawmakers discussed sensitive content like “FBI files, medical records, Social Security numbers and even a file containing information about a safe house location for [the U.S.] President” that was accessed over LimeWire.
While this post does not present a stance on the policymaking or even the level of intelligence it takes to accidentally share drive contents over LimeWire, the ThreatFire continues to trigger and protect our community against a number of malware executables accessed over the LimeWire sharing network. Always
Okay, so I like programs which install context menu entries and I always review them. So, in time, my context menu becomes extremely clogged up and is very hard to navigate, not to mention being slow to load. Shell Menu View (SMV) can help you.
Shell Menu View is a small and lightweight Nirsoft app that allows you to disable/enable context menu entries. What’s cool about it is that it does not completely delete your context menu entries, so you can easily enable them anytime.
Here are more notes on this prog:
- Portable: Does not require installation, is fully portable. (See “What Is Portable”)
- Does not display SOME context menu entries, e.g. the 7-zip entry. The developer Nirsoft promises to improve on this in the future.
- Additional info: Displays registry key, description, path, etc of the context menu entries you right-clicked on
Wish List
- Currently Shell Menu View only supports the Windows Explorer context menu. It would be nice if you could also disable/enable IE, Firefox context menu items.
Verdict: Great Nirsoft utility that everyone should download to be at hand.
Compatibility: Windows 98/2000/XP
Version Tested:
Noaways, a lot of people use Facebook. Most people have lots of friends and play/use many of the games/apps on Facebook. It would be a great pain for people to lose their Facebook account for any reason.
Archive Facebook is a browser extension for Firefox that allows you to backup your Facebook accounts. It has all the functions that you would ever need for that purpose. So what does it backup??
- Photos
- Messages
- List of friends
- Notes
- Events
- Joined groups
- Activities
It is currently in beta stage so more improvements are to be made in the near future.
So, how do you use it?
“ArchiveFB” is added to your Firefox tools menu when you install this extension. Now logon to your Facebook account, and select from the tools menu “Archive FB > Archive”.
Now Archive FB will backup your Facebook account into a local folder (the Application Data folder by default). If you have a lot of friends, photos, etc. the process might make a very long time, even an hour or two maybe, so you’d better archive your account during the night.
Facebook menu option is added to the ArchiveFB menu giving the user the option to view backup accounts and restore them if users want to do so. The developers describe the following:
Once the archiving process has completed, you will see an entry in the sidebar that says “Facebook | username date” where username is your Facebook username and date is the current date. Click on the entry.
You will see your Facebook profile page appear and at the bottom will be an annotation bar where you can highlight text or make comments on a page for your personal records. Click through your archived Facebook pages to ensure that all pages have been archived.
All pages listed in the introduction should be archived. You can tell if a page has been archived by placing your cursor over a link. Look in the bottom left hand corner and Firefox will show the location of the link i.e. if the location starts with “file://”, it is on your hard drive, if it starts with “http://”, it is on the web. If it is not on your local hard drive, try to archive your account again. If the second attempt doesn’t work, please notify us and we will attempt to fix the problem.
Verdict: Great tool that every Facebook user will find useful. Now the only thing I want is a version of this tool for IE and/or Google Chrome.
Version Tested: 1.1
Compatibility: Firefox 2.5 or above on Windows.
Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13993
Note: This is a repeat of an old article – just ignore it because I need to link to alphainventions to submit my site.
Is this part 8 already? Anyway, this is the second - to – last issue of the “How to Promote your Blog” series. I’m sorry for the ten-day interval, but I found some great new programs these few days to post about, so here the post is [finally]!
Today I’m going to talk about AlphaInventions, another great blog channel surfing service similar to previously discussed BlogSurfer.us. This time it’s a bit different in a sense that,
- This service aims to be a channel for collaboration between webmasters. For example, if you comment quickly on a blog just after a post is written up, the webmaster or author will be shocked at the speed his post is noticed, and will usually follow up, and maybe even visit your blog if you have one.
- AlphaInventions helps you with this. It crawls the net looking for new blog posts, and those blogs are shown in the AlphaInventions window blog surfer. So people can be notified about your new blog posts immediately and provoke interaction between readers, bloggers and other webmasters.
Here’s what Cheru Jackson, the guy who created AlphaInventions, has to say:
If you update or publish your blog at the same time my visitors are browsing blogs in my site then my visitors will get a chance to see your blog in real-time. BAM! (the entire blog is in their face instantly) It’s not even annoying to watch. Is it alpha addicts??
I also provide a link to your blog in case they want it to open your blog in a new window, or bookmark your blog . The links provides your title, and description to help my visitors get a better understanding on what your blog is about, and get more interested. Alphainventions.com is useful for wordpress.com , typepad.com, spaces.live.com, and blogger.com I love it, and want to grow it like a tree. Yahh!
To get more traffic from alphainventions.com just keep your blog updated or go to the homepage, and notify readers about your blog. It’s so simple.
More..
A realistic goal of mine for alphainventions.com is to provide a way for us to see only blogs that we are interested in update in real time, because this will provide more quality, and blogger interaction.
Interaction part is why I built the site. It’s fun to see people come to your site and find it interesting as soon as you update or publish, so I want to provide a faster ways of doing this.
Earlier in the project I tried to make a fair, and logical way for people to submit their link every so often to get more readers for a short period of time, but so many people didn’t understand how the site worked so I guess they may have overlooked it. I’m thinking they didn’t know why they should submit their link.
Help please…
Everyone wants their blog to be read instantly, and I want to provide everyone with that experience.
If anyone here can provide an example of a full explanation on how the site works in better terms it will be greatly appreciated.
Good job to those who do understand how alphainventions.com works. If I looked at it from outside of my webmaster box I’d probably be a little confused about what alphainventions was at first sight.
Many people have their blogs set to ping services like weblogs.com when their blog has been published or updated. Visit http://alphainventions.com to block your blog from being read if you’d like.
So how do you submit the blog? Visit http://alphainventions.com, and wait for a while. When some other blog is fully loaded, click “Add My Blog” in the top. Type in your blog’s root url, and click validate. Now AlphaInventions validates your blog so it can know when your blog is updated. When the process is finished, the Submit button is enabled, just click it to finish the process.
Submit daily to get the best results!
Windows 7 has been released for nearly 3 weeks already, and many people are starting to upgrade to this version of the Microsoft OS recently. While Windows 7 is much more efficient than Windows Vista, it still needs a considerable amount of resources, e.g. RAM and CPU speed.
If your CPU speed doesn’t meet the minimum requirement to upgrade and you want to do so, you can look at the article about upgrading CPU on Tech- For Everyone, split into four parts, listed below.
Replacing or Upgrading Your CPU
Replacing or Upgrading Your CPU – Pt 2
Upgrading the CPU pt3 – Selecting A Processor
Upgrading Your CPU – Conclusion(s)
[...]
I had long ago decided that I was going to install Windows 7 in the 64-bit version (my machine is not too old, and so it has the required 64-bit hardware) as my trials with the beta versions of 7 had been so stellar. 64-bit computing is officially here for us Average Folk, and it has many advantages. One of the nicest is the ability to “access” more RAM memory. [...]
So.. in celebration of Win7, I decided I would pack in as much RAM as my board would hold. (I wrote about that here, Windows 7 64-bit Adventures.) That gave me 8 Gigabytes and a certain amount of bragging rights.
(When I started computing, way back in the day, I honestly never dreamed I would one day have this much. [...]
Please Click on the first link above to complete the article.
I generally don’t use launchers since I don’t like to slow my startup process with them. However, Launchy virtually starts in no time, and only uses ~500k of resources, and also it looks very cool, so I can’t resist in keeping it.
Launchy is a launcher that helps you open files, programs, etc. without needing to browse the start menu or any other folders. I install a lot of programs to test before writing about them on Freeware Elite, so my start menu is always clogged.
Launchy indexes the start menu and any other folders you want in realtime, so the search is always extremely quick. You just type in a few letters and a few choices appear. The number of choices in the menu shown depends on the settings.
You open the program by pressing a hotkey, Alt-Space by default (you can change this), and start typing to search. What’s great is that it can also do simple calculations quickly (+,-,*,/) by typing them in the search box.
Verdict: Great launcher because of the aesthetically pleasing interface and also the highly customizable settings. Only con is that there is no portable version (what did you expect? It runs on startup!:))
Version Tested: 2.1.2
Compatibility: Win 98 or above.
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/launchy/files/Launchy%20for%20Windows/#
Alright, so now many people use Facebook to connect to their friend, colleagues, classmates, etc. However, there are times when you receive email that tells you to confirm your facebook login credentials. Beware of malicious content on Facebook…
Case 1. Phishing attacks on your email address provided to Facebook
Lately there have been a lot of phishing attacks, seemingly from “service@facebook.com” telling you to click a link and type in your login credentials to confirm your account. This is fake!
Case 2. Email telling you to open attachment of reset password
Lately there have also been emails from also” service@facebook.com” telling you that Facebook has reset your password “for security reasons” and attached is “your new password”. The attachment is a zip file called “Facebook_Password_**.zip”, where ** is your username.
This attachment seems innocent, but actually it is some carefully packaged malware. Once you download the attachment, your computer is infected and so are your friends. Thankfully, free security products such as AVG and Spyware Terminator will detect this malware.
Case 3. Private messages on Facebook telling you to view an interesting video
Recently, there have been multiple PMs on Facebook telling you that you have been captured on “hidden camera”, with a link to the video. If you click the link, you are redirected at least 3 times to a seemingly youtube video and tries to download a virus to your computer.
Fake Message:
Seemingly geniune but false youtube site.
Now the site is trying to download some rogue antivirus app to my PC
Let’s Quote What’s On My PC:
Do not open email, let alone attachments, that you even have the slightest doubt. Trust me, if the doubt is there, it is most likely fake and contains malware.
Normally when you needed to copy file paths, you needed to right-click on a file, select Properties and copy the path from within. This is a cumbersome process, and it’s compulsory to have a separate context menu entry to copy the file’s full path, file name, etc.
Copy Path does this for us by adding a submenu to files and folders’ context menus allowing you to copy the folder path of the folder the file is in, the file’s full path or only the file’s name plus extension, as illustrated in the example below.
You can also select multiple files and copy their paths all to the clipboard, from which you can paste into Word, Notepad, etc.
Verdict: Great extension. A must-have in everyone’s arsenal of utilities.
Note: There are three more utilities on the Internet with the same name and do the same thing, but this is the best, so use the download link provided below.
Compatibility: WinAll.
Version Tested: 1.1
Download: CLICK HERE
It’s been a long time since this blog started our updates from Kevin’s FreePrintable.net.
I’ve now dumped the updates – I’ve lost sponsorship from Kevin.
