GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 19, 5-14-09

Thu May 14 18:54:58 PDT 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 19                           

5-14-09

1 IE8            

2 Safe surfing

3 Google improvements, Windows features, BSA hot air, hate speech 

4 Windows 7 test

5 Rogue scanners                      

6 License key

Last week’s Threat featured IE8 going Critical.  At that point I’d just installed it and hadn’t played with it at all, but had seen a few PCs have trouble with it.

A week later, I can tell you a little about my experiences with it, what I like and dislike and leave the decision up to you, but it’s not a real OS killer like a few other Critical Updates in the past.

Some people do have problems with it but they seem mostly limited to buggy add-ons imported from IE7.  Malware add-ons, which you likely don’t know are even there, play havoc with the update so be sure to do a sweep with all of your security scanners before trying to install IE8.  You might even uninstall things like toolbars, Flash Player, Adobe Reader etc. first and reinstall after the update but that may be a bit extreme.

After installation you have to reboot, naturally, and you’ll be prompted to answer some questions the first time you open the program just like IE7, but there are some additional options.  I’m not going into great detail here, since I wasn’t thinking and didn’t take notes, but one group asks about using things like Accelerators and Web Slices.  These are extensions like you’d see with Firefox and aren’t really useful at this time so I said “No” on those options, made sure my Search was set to Google, turned on the Phishing filter, now known as SmartScreen, and went on to my normal home page.

It imported my history, favorites and add-ons without a problem (hence my calling their removal “extreme” above) and nothing crashed.  

The first thing I noticed, though, was that it seemed much slower to open the program itself, new pages and new tabs.  Most web reviews I’ve read have mentioned how speedy it is but I must disagree.  I’m running on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor with 2 GB of G Skill RAM and SATA II hard drives with a 6.0 Mb DSL connection, so it’s not a hardware or bandwidth issue, and my startup list is pretty clean so it shouldn’t be a resource issue.  It’s just slower.

On the plus side, there are some changes I really like.  The new Tab behavior has proven quite handy, as I tend to keep many pages open and often open links from those pages.  IE8 groups all of those tabs together in groups and, when multiple groups are open, color codes each set.

For example, I often have Fark, SlashDot and Google News all open.  If I open links in new tabs from each of these pages then the new links, as well as the originating link, will change color.  So Fark might be yellow, SlashDot might be pink and Google might be green.  Very handy when trying to keep track of what you’re doing.

Another nice set of features is the options when opening a new tab.  You can open a recently closed tab, which is convenient for those “oops” moments, as well as open a “virtual” session in something called “InPrivate Browsing”.

InPrivate works just like the normal browser session but it doesn’t save your history, temporary files, search terms (unless you do them in a third party toolbar), user names or passwords.  Amusing web pundits call this “p*rn mode”.  I’m sure you can guess that phrase, and figure out their point.

There are other improvements that you won’t see, such as a beefier phishing filter; improved ActiveX protections and cross-site scripting attack detection.  The Address Bar also offers some new protection by highlighting the actual domain of the current website as opposed to showing the whole confusing URL.

The domain is bolded while everything else is grayed out, although you can still copy and paste the link as normal.

Overall I like IE8, but I really wish it were faster.  It may well be my Panda firewall causing the throttling, or Spybot TeaTimer or who knows what else, but IE7 didn’t suffer from the issue.  

Maybe the first update will fix it ;)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Do a search at Google today and you'll see a new link at the top of
the page, "Show options..." That link opens up a whole new set of
search tools that look like they'll be spectacularly useful and even a
little fun:

http://tinyurl.com/r4ndcy

This chart provides a rundown of some of the major features introduced
in each Windows iteration, as well as a quick look at the minimum
hardware requirements for XP, Vista, and 7:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10238901-12.html

Supposedly, the software industry lost $50 billion to international
“piracy” last year, $9 billion in the U.S. That’s according to the
Business Software Alliance’s latest study:

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4785

Facebook has removed two Holocaust denial groups claiming they
violated Facebook's Terms of Service by promoting hate:

http://tinyurl.com/ocvnz4

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com 
www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

With the upcoming release of Windows 7 later this year, many of us are wondering if our existing PCs will be able to run the new operating system.

Microsoft is offering a tool that will scan the PC to evaluate the hardware and determine if it is Windows 7 capable.  The tool is called Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and it's available here:

http://tinyurl.com/qumqcc 

We normally caution our readers to avoid beta versions of any application, but this one is safe.

Carlita Lupino

Card57 at gmail.com 

Threat of the Week

Rogue spyware/adware/virus scanners are rife on the Internet, often hosted on misconfigured servers belonging to ad company servers.  Those animated banner ads you see on many websites don’t actually originate at the usually legitimate site, they are fed through that site from ad companies.

Hackers can get into these servers and plant malicious Flash ads, which drop the malware installer directly onto your PC and then generate some sort of message that tells you you’re infected.

There’s no program that can protect you from these things.  The malware is “polymorphic”, meaning that it changes its own programming code frequently.  This allows it to evade detection by real-time virus and spyware scanners.

Your best defense is to be familiar with the security programs that are memory-resident on your computer.  You may have Symantec/Norton, McAfee, Panda, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, whatever, but you need to be aware of this.

If something pops up or a slides up on your screen warning of an infection and the window doesn’t specifically say it originated with your active scanner, don’t touch it.  Don’t try to close it, don’t click any buttons in the window, just move your cursor away from it and stop.

Hold down the Alt key and tap F4.  If it doesn’t close reboot the PC.  Period.  You may lose work, you may lose information, you may lose partially downloaded files but you may save yourself from massive headaches and likely a visit to your local computer shop.

Trust me on this.

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Email Question of the Week

Q:  PC GURUS, My neighbor has the antivirus 360 virus on his computer and he ran the program (not knowing it was a virus) and now cannot get into windows past the login screen.(also tried safe mode). We can reload the win xp operating system but he has lost the xp product key. Can you help us retrieve the key from the hard drive. I took the hard drive out and connected it to my computer via usb external enclosure and we can recover all documents but not the product key. It would be very much appreciated if you can provide a link, or instructions on how to recover this key. Thanks

A:  The key sometimes was either on the side of the case on a Microsoft sticker, or it could be with the documentation of the computer on the same type of sticker.  If not, there are programs that exist to be able to pull out the key from the corrupt install.  The only thing you have to worry about with these tools are that some anti-virus products recognize them as harmful programs, but I have personally used them and attest to them being harmless.  The one I suggest is Magical Jellybean Keyfinder from http://magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/.

Download the file from the Download Latest Build link on the right, open the zip file and run the EXE file inside.  When the program opens, go to Tools > Load Hive and point it to the Windows directory on the drive that you pulled out of the other machine.  At that point, it should find the keys and report them back to you.  

If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail back

Daniel A. Williams
daniel at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

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