And it seems she not only cooked up great dishes on her long running cooking show but she also cooked up shark repellent during her time in the OSS. Glad she never got the two mixed up:

Julia then worked with the OSS Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, where she helped develop shark repellent. The repellent was a critical tool during WWII, and was coated on explosives that were targeting German U-boats. Before the introduction of the shark repellent, curious sharks would sometimes set off the explosives when they bumped into them.

Seems she was hoping she actually might become a spy but that never came about. Perhaps that she was 6’2” tall had something to do with it. Still, being Chief of the OSS Registry with the weight of top security clearances riding upon her shoulders is nothing to smirk at.

From 1944-1945, Julia was sent overseas and worked in Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka, and Kunming, China. During these last two years in the OSS, Julia served as Chief of the OSS Registry. Julia — having top security clearances — knew every incoming and outgoing message that passed throughout her office, as her Registry was serving all the intelligence branches. During her time in Ceylon, Julia handled highly classified papers that dealt with the invasion of the Malay Peninsula. Julia was fascinated with the work, even when there were moments of danger.

I always knew from my time in the US Submarine Force during the Cold War that my country was damn good at keeping it’s war related/military secrets to themselves but I never new they were that good. It seems that she was a lot more than a decent, funny, and rather unique chef on television that appeared to occasionally put a bit more wine into herself than she did into her cooking. But then again…looks can be deceiving can’t they?

Bless ya’ Julia, we never knew.

Defensio, the other anti-spam service and competitor to Akismet, apparently corrupted it’s own database table today which effectively rendered my admin useless and just about locked up my site while it was at it. I got my first clue this morning when I found 42 comments in moderation and a warning in the admin (once I finally managed to get in) that Defensio could not process, you guessed it, those same 42 comments. And hitting the “Process Now” button did nothing. Hitting the “Process Now” button hasn’t ever done anything since I installed the plugin but since everything else worked fine I didn’t worry too much about it. I actually kind of liked the way Defensio was laid out, color coded comments according to how bad they reeked of “spamminess”, hiding the worst offenders so you only had to pick over the moderate stuff and the plugin was pretty accurate after the “training period” was over, at least on par with Aksimet’s accuracy. Too bad. As soon as I managed to deactivate Defensio, everything went back to normal.

Whether the service went down or the table was corrupted, my host screwing up or all three combined, crippling my site as a result isn’t kosher especially since I had no idea how long it had been that way. I saved all the SQL errors that stated that Defensio couldn’t create this and couldn’t update that etc and I’ll send this along to the developers to see what they have to say. I’d also like to know, since Defensio works off of external servers just like Aksimet, why it needs to create a database table in the first place. I may have missed something here.

But wait, there’s more…

In the name of security and efficiency I finally decided to lose two of my longtime plugins. The first of these provided those roving bands of blog muggers valuable info that they might use to hack there way into my beloved WordPress install and that was the plugin that powered my “Plugins I Use” page. You can always learn something new now and then and putting out a list of your activated plugins might let a hacker know that your running an out of date or badly coded plugin that just might provide an easy way into your files and so that plugin was shown the door. Since the plugin constituted what is considered a security risk, the fact that it has not been updated in over a year and is not listed in the WordPress Plugins Directory…I’ll just leave it at that.

The second one was the Community Cloud plugin. Grandad had a problem with this plugin wherein his site became all choked up due to the number of queries to his database this plugin was causing. There’s actually nothing wrong with the Communty Cloud plugin, it’s more because Grandad has a plethora of comments coming in everyday and the poor plugin was having to keep up a constant dialog with the SQL database so it could properly update the “cloud”.  Now I can’t hold a candle to the number of comments I get a day to Grandad’s mob but since the Community Cloud page never seemed to be hit at all plus the fact I Do-Follow anyway, why take the chance I might eventually become as popular as Grandad someday?

Just a little joke there.

Besides, I’d rather have my site as speedy and efficient as it can be for any readers that may stop by.

Note: There’s nothing wrong with the Community Cloud plugin. For your average site with an average amount of comments there shouldn’t be a problem at all. It was solely my personal choice to stop using it.

Last but not least I finally got around to locking down my WordPress install mostly according to Matt Cutts 3 steps but modified a bit between what my host’s cPanel offers for extra security and what a couple of his commenter’s suggested so that’s done at last. I feel so much better about myself now.

Now usually I format this type of “in case you interested” post as yet another edition of the “JT Evening News” (published whenever I feel like it)……but I didn’t. At least I put it in the correct category though.

When Microsoft first came out with Windows Live OneCare version 1 and being the old beta tester that I am, I decided to give it a (very) short trial period by creating a restore point on my computer at the time and giving OneCare a week’s worth of thrashing. It only lasted three days but it was enough to convince me that the idea of the maker of my OS developing an Internet security suite for that very same OS was an idea that appealed to me. For too long it appeared that no matter the brand the Security suite I was currently using at the time, it’s merging with the OS was not so much by a harmonious mutual consent but more rather by hostile take-over. There were always two distinct separate entities here. The OS (Windows) and the security suite whose presence it barely seemed to tolerate.

Now over a year later, Windows Live OneCare 2 beta (call it WLOC 2 for short) shows up on the scene and after surfing around for any initial horror stories and finding only the usual “it trashed my computer” and the ever popular “It hosed my OS! Thanks for nothing!” from those who probably didn’t have any control over their computers in the first place, I decided to give this new beta version 2 a try out. So I sent my regular Internet security suite off for a well earned vacation and let Live OneCare 2 beta take over the duties for the interim.

Initial impressions:

The suite has only been installed for 4 days so when I say initial impressions, that’s exactly what I mean. In fact I wouldn’t have even bothered with this post if it hadn’t been for a few very obvious differences I immediately noticed in comparison with my usual Internet security suite. I’ll abstain from outright comparison in this post due to the short time OneCare has been running on my machine however, here’s a few initial thoughts:

The PC: 2004 HP Pavilion a645c, Windows XP Pro (fully updated), AMD 3200+ CPU w/ 1GB (unshared) DDR memory.

HDD: Seagate 200GB w/19.6 used.

Normal security suite: Panda Internet Security Suite 2007

Connection: DSL 768k wireless router

Install: Install was painless and for the most part, intuitive to the user. One thing though–you need a Windows ID to complete the install and I would strongly suggest you sign in first before you attempt the install. And the installation is online only–the download is only a 1.4 mb install program.

Setup: Setup, compared with other popular security suites is downright simple but that’s the idea here. I set the firewall to ask me what I wanted to do when a program wanted access to the Internet since I do like to maintain some control. Once I clicked “Always allow” for a particular program, the alert didn’t come up again for that program unless I upgraded the program.At that point I had to allow it again since WLOC 2 had detected that the program has changed. To my surprise, some new users/testers on the WLOC forum didn’t like this alert coming up just for an upgrade. I can’t understand this since I would most definitely want to know if a program had been changed, especially if I didn’t do it, right? And this wasn’t any different than way my regular Internet security suite operated as far as updated programs went.

Virus scanning: Virus scanning breaks down to three choices for the user. I’ll go into some detail here since this is the meat and potatoes of any Internet security suite along with the firewall:

• Quick Scan: This scan is supposed to check the most common places that virus’s hangout on one’s PC. This appeared to include the Windows, Program Files, Document and Settings and of course all the IE Temporary Files Folders in the scan.
  Time to completion: 2.5 min

• Custom Scan: Does the same thing as most other subscription based suites–allows the user to choose what folders they wish to scan. This of course, works as it’s supposed to in fact I like the overall simplicity and straightforwardness of the entire suite and this is no exception. One glaring exception though. There is no way to save a custom scan and folders have to be selected all over again for another scan. This is not enough reason for me to pass by WLOC 2 as my full time security suite but enough reason for me to state a case for saving custom scans on the forum…several times if necessary.
• Complete Scan: Does just what it says. Every file on your PC, no matter how small or insignificant, anywhere they may be get checked. Stick in any thumb drive, external drive, flash media card, DVD or CD and it gets added to scan automatically or at least that’s what it says it’s supposed to do. For now I just ran the 19.6GB I have stuffed on my hard drive. There’s been some initial complaints that the complete scan takes too long which was one of the main complaints of the previous versions as well and after my test I tend to agree. This, in my opinion, is something the developers absolutely have to improve on before the final release. Too many users have had the slow scan times as one of their main complaints for too long now.
  Time to Completion: 55 min
• Right-click menu scans: Like all the subscription based suites and even some of the free virus scanners, a “Scan for virus’s” type selection is added to the right-click context menu when right clicking on a drive, folder(s) or file(s).
• Email scanning: WLOC 2 does not scan your email messages as they come in but it does scan all email messages in a full scan. What it does do (same as Symantec does when a user disables email scanning) is provide real time protection on all file extensions, which includes attachments of course, as these files are opened. You can check out the info at this thread in the WLOC 2 forum. Whether you agree with this or not is up to you of course. With such email clients as the new Windows Live Mail (Outlook’s replacement) and Thunderbird 2 with their built in spam/junk/phishing type filters, it’s getting to the point where separate email scanning by a separate program is fairly redundant.

Virus scan initial conclusions:

I do realize that if someone has crammed 300GB of music, games and videos onto a 500GB drive, even the fastest virus scanner is going to tell you to go do your shopping and come back in a couple hours so users shouldn’t expect too much improvement here. You can only scan a hard drive so fast. And if your hard drive is like the one I mentioned above and badly fragmented as well, any virus scanner will tell you to go to bed and it might be done in the morning if they’re lucky. I’d like to see about a 1/4 increase in speed overall.

Email scanning? Jury’s still out on that one. Stay tuned.

Firewall: Okay, it has one. It’s two-way. It throws the proper alerts in your face when a program first asks for access to the Internet and whenever a previously allowed program is updated which is exactly what I except it to do. It also gives the proper choices which are “Always allow”, “Temporarily block” (in so many words) and just plain “Block” meaning always. I would like to see an additional choice added which is “Allow this once” but it’s not absolutely necessary. More on this later.

Back up, Tune up and OneCare Circle: I don’t use currently use the back up feature or the tune up feature as I’ve always done all these kind of tune-up type operations myself however, I did run the tune up feature a couple of times and the one glaring thing that stood out is that you can’t select which of the five operations you want to run and there’s no “Skip” button either. It’s all or nothing and some customization for this feature needs to be added for those who may wish to have a tad more control over things.

And since WLOC 2 is only installed on one computer here and there’s no home network available, I’ll have to pass on this one. Sorry about that.

The good and the bad or “what I’ve found so far”:

First, what I don’t like:

1. Scanning is too slow overall but doesn’t need that much of a speed increase to bring it on par with the other security suites I’ve used before. This has been a common complaint since Version 1 hit the streets (major).
2. You can’t save a custom scan setup (major).
3. Cannot temporarily allow a program access to the Internet (minor).
4. Cannot pick and choose which operations to run for a Tune-up and which ones to skip (major). A “Skip” button for the Tune-up run dialog box would be nice also (minor).

Anything else remains to be seen.

What I do like:

1. WLOC 2 uses up significantly less resources than the popular Internet security suites tend to, thus making my computer more responsive and allows more physical ram to be available. Whether this is due to not doing as much as those other suites, the fact that MS is designing this program to work with their OS hence a more seamless integration or a combination of both is yet to be seen. meanwhile I’m enjoying a more peppy machine.
2. Windows loads faster. See above.
3. My Internet is significantly faster than it was with my usual suite installed. This tells me initially that my usual Internet security suite may be choking down my Internet more than it needs to. Go Figure.
4. Simplicity at last! This is the way it should be for the average user. Effective, non-invading and simple! As set-it and forget-it as possible which is what Intenet security for the public at large who use Windows machines should be.

Conclusions: I do believe that WLOC 2 beta will have a significantly longer test run on my computer than version 1 did. What I need it to do on a daily basis, it appears to do well enough and since I long ago learned which side of tracks are (mostly) safe to surf on, I’m not too worried about anything getting through during the test period (however long that may be). But sometime in the near future I’ll have to put the real-time monitoring and scanning to the test and then we’ll see how WLOC 2 really performs. Meanwhile I have a couple of stand alone backup programs to check WLOC 2′s effectiveness as the days go by.

More later.

Technorati tags: Windows Live OneCare 2, OneCare 2 beta, Internet Security

Nah…why would anyone think that?

I’ve been using and testing IE 7.0 since the first preview version was released in February 2006 and rather than write up yet another review of the browser I’ll just link you to Paul Thurrot’s write up on the final and yes, it’s well worth the release despite it’s funky UI layout, a problem that MS’s IE 7.0 team states will be addressed for a later release. Personally, after three days or so of using the new layout, I easily adjusted to it much like a person who has their home remodeled while away on vacation has to get used to their home’s new layout. The increased functional capability and the increased security benefits outweigh the strange terrain of the new browser itself.

One thing about the new browser for anyone wanting to update to IE 7.0:

You have to be running XP Home or PRO SP2 and the OS absolutely has to be fully updated(!) including the infamous “Windows Genuine Advantage” tool otherwise it’s a no go.

For myself, I have nothing to hide from Microsoft or anyone else for that matter and I couldn’t care less if the WGA “phones home” occasionally. Microsoft, like any other large (huge) software company has better things to do than sift through the stripped down data (that WGA sends) of millions of users looking for some juicy tidbit that doesn’t exist in the first place and I’ve never been sorry I’ve kept my OS fully updated. The XP Pro that I use is definately a better OS than when it was first loaded on this machine when it was new so it’s user’s choice and using IE 6.0 as your main browser these days is assuredly asking for trouble even with a good firewall and anti-virus program.

Bottom line: If ya’ ain’t got it…get it. If your one of those who absolutely will not let MS touch your computer, at least consider using Firefox (wait a few days for version 2.0 though) or one of the IE based browsers such as Avant or Maxthon, all of which gives you enhanced security options not available in IE 6.0, tabs and Ad-blocking (which even IE 7.0 does not have).

Tags: Tags: Internet Explorer 7.0, IE 7.0, WGA, Windows Genuine Advantage, adware, Internet Explorer 6, IE 6, improved security, browser security, Avant browser, Firefox, Maxthon

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Think about this:

Why in the world would anybody want to hack their way into or endeavor to infect an OS that has less than 5% of the market share (MAC OSX, Linux etc)? What’s the point? (No offense here…just  making a case)

These type of people either do it for kicks, are just plain old troublemakers or have some fanatical point to make. If I wanted to cause trouble, I would most assuredly hit the OS that had the majority of the market share in other words, the one that everybody uses be it personnel or business. If I was theoretically out for blood I certainly wouldn’t waste my time and talent on the small players.

If it were the other the other way around and say MAC’s carried the world’s weight around and Windows users were the minority, guess which OS would be “full of holes” then?

Plain and simple.

Well, looks like the guys at Google needed to get rid of some more of their massive profits And  Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (along with others) are now 1.67 billion dollars richer and in the Google tradition (most of the time anyway) YouTube will continue to operate as an independent company run by it’s current 67 employees and co-founders.

So how did this go down I wonder? Something like this:

Google: “So here’s the deal guys…You let us buy your company for tons and mountains of dough but you can still keep it, okay?.”

YouTube: “Uh…Okay.”

Not bad for three ex-PayPal employees I don’t think. And for a company less than a year old from their debut date no less. I should be so lucky.

Microsoft gained it’s current position by forcing out the competition and stepping all over them. Google is currently working to gain the same type of position by offering huge amounts of $$$ in offers to “little guy” sites that they think is a good idea. And then they give all these ideas and more back to the public with their various services, information and software.

Am I missing something here?

Hmmph! Works for me and I think I like their style over MS’s.

We shall see.

Hmmm…050/50 chance here. A winner or the death knell for Microsoft and the Windows OS?

Only time will tell. Just don’t be too ready to lose that OEM copy of XP you have.

Windows Live OneCare 1.5 beta (XP and Vista):

Just another Antivirus/spyware/firewall/ internet security suite…this time from MS itself. It works, it doesn’t bother you with trivial matters and doesn’t hog your resources either. Set it, let it keep itself updated and forget it.

The difference from all the others? Lowest yearly subscription price (so far), runs basic Windows maintenance automatic routines that most users don’t bother with or know about in the first place (defrag, clearing out old data, temp files etc) plus full back up capabilities. Actually pretty good stuff.

A “set it and forget it” Internet security suite…it works.

Now if MS really wanted to set the world on it’s butt…give the program and it’s subscription free of charge. They can afford it and with the promised street prices for the various offerings of Windows Vista, I think they should give it some serious consideration.

Ah what the heck, they’d probably be hauled up on the Green Carpet for unfair practices or something.

Technorati Tags: Patch Tuesday, Windows, Windows XP, Imac, mac, OS X, OSX, Windows Vista, Vista, Linux, Google, YouTube, Live OneCare, OneCare

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