Thanks for that, Windows 10 installer

 

It's new. It's here. It's better than the previous version. But if the install goes wrong, as it did on the fourth machine I tried it on, the pop-up alerts aren't quite ready yet.

 

Thanks for that, Windows 10!

The Week of the SSN

Social maybe. Security, less so. Numbers…very very large.

It’s been a curious week here at the Crash Bunker, my place in cyberspace during times of technical fallout. I took the express elevator down here from Reboot Central on Wednesday and I’ve not surfaced since. That’s mostly because the Bunker maintains a cool 65 degree temperature year-round, and is unaffected by the humid storm weather up aloft. 

But watching news feeds down here, I’m glad I went underground.

Like most owners of private information, I’ve been hacked off about some recent news events. I’m talking mostly about the results of an investigation mounted by the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management, which became public on Friday.

Yes, the OPM (which by now should have become the Office of Human Resources, surely?) announced “with great confidence” that a data breach on June 12th resulted in the theft of more than 21 million social security numbers--along with other personal data, such as fingerprint records, addresses, mothers’ maiden names, and other grist for identity theft mill.

It’s a beautiful thing that the OPM should have such confidence in the findings of its investigation. Too bad that it didn’t have the same level of confidence in, oh, I don’t know, the strength of its data security systems. And a security system worthy of confidence.

Be that as it may, retribution proved to be swift and terrible, as the director of the office, Katherine Archuleta, offered her resignation, and got a presidential thumbs-down in the Coliseum of Career Sacrifice. Blood in the sand makes people feel better, apparently. 

But it doesn't take data out of the hands of criminals. 

As far as I can tell, only two people have come out of this debacle ahead: The hacker responsible for it, and Kevin Mitnick. (Lawyers take note: I’m not saying they are connected in any way other than the one in the next paragraph. Keep those lawsuits in your pants!)

The real star of the whole event was my old prison pal Kevin Mitnick, whose company profile describes him as “the world’s most famous hacker.” NPR went through its Rolodex, found Kev, and called him to conduct a guided marketing pitch for his security company. The segment was so interlaced with many phone pings and system alert sounds that I’m sure that Kev had hired one of the old prison posse as a sound effects editor for the hour.

There is some reason for optimism, here: Like most people, I should be safe from this attack, because have never applied to work for the government, and I don’t associate with anyone who does. 

Besides, with any luck, millions of those social security numbers may not be valid:  The office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration had audited active SSNs back in March and discovered that either a staggering 6.5 million Americans are over 112 years old, or somebody at the Social Security Death Index has a lot of overtime ahead of them.

A spokesperson for the Social Security’s Death Master File could not be reached for this article.

        

And now for an update…

So much for data security. Anyone fancy some good, old-fashioned bugs? Whaddaya say, New York Stock Exchange? Care to give us the lowdown on the mystery malfunction  that disrupted trading for more than three hours on Wednesday?

Nobody’s saying what caused the outage, but we’re betting on the same kind of thing that brought down NYSE in 2001—a software update.

Ah, how well I remember the chuckling at Reboot Central when the then-VP Bob Zito described the problem fourteen years ago...

“When we brought the system up in the morning, we only realized then that the software upgrade did not take.”

When the collective “Well, DUH!” from every IT guy in the universe died down, we just about made out the follow-up--“When we tried to revert back to the old system, that wouldn’t work and we needed time to reboot”--before collapsing in laughter.

Surely the NYSE can’t have made the same mistake twice—especially after the news that even Samsung doesn’t trust system updates.

But frankly, the markets could have used a few brakes in the middle of the week. This is the kind of technical problem the Asian exchanges and could only have prayed for, as the Shanghai composite shed 4 percent, and Hang Seng 1.1 percent, of their worth on the same day.

I’d fly a million miles…if the damned plane would take off

As if the NYSE glitch wasn’t enough, Wednesday morning also saw United Airlines grounded its flights due to a network connectivity issue. Too bad for United that network connectivity wasn’t a problem for delayed passengers. Snidest Tweet Award goes to John B. Hammer for the following gem:

I’ve been using @united as my primary air carrier for quite a while. Why? I like to live life on the edge. #groundstop.

Two days later, in an unrelated incident, a lucky bug-swatting United customer was awarded a million bonus points for submitting a bug report. Jordan Weins’ Twitter-ready analysis? Wow. @united really paid out! Got a million miles for my bug bounty submissions! Very cool.

But where were your bug bounty reports two days earlier, Jordan? And just how do you know so much about the flaws in United’s systems, eh? Thousands of disgruntled non-flyers want to know.

Of course, things could have been worse for the airline: A United pilot could have brought live ammunition on board a flight from Texas to Germany, and tried to dispose of the evidence down the pressurized blue cyclone of an airplane lavatory. Oh, wait a minute…that actually happened. 

Never mind.

Instructions for Windows and Mac and Life

1. Click the picture to see the instructions.

2. Do what they say. 

Switch fast between extended and mirrored screens: An OSX godsend

You plug an external monitor or projector into your Macbook Air or Pro, and what do you see? It's anyone's guess. It could be an extension of your desktop or a reproduction of what's on your laptop. And it might not be what you want to see on the big screen. Don't mess around with System Preferences. Learn this keyboard shortcut:

COMMAND + F1

Holds down the Apple command key and press that chiclet F1 key above the 1 and next to Esc.

This toggles between display modes: If you were mirroring, it'll extend your desktop. If your desktop was extended, it'll mirror.

This is a handy trick to have up your sleeve when you're presenting to a group and you don't want them to watch you cue up what you'll show them next. Use extended desktops to do work behind the scenes and hit Command+F1 for the big reveal. Then Command+F1 again to hide your work.  

Dredging Dying Disks

Crash Central deals with dying disks daily. Now there's a line that belonged in The King's Speech. It's also a truth universally acknowledged. Several times a day, someone will come in with a disk that's either so crusted with malware or so pockmarked with bad sectors that it can't boot. Naturally, the data's not backed up. So the race is on to get the data off the drive before it screeches its last.

I usually slip the hard disk out of the old machine and into a USB drive reader hooked up to my production machine. Then I get all the personal data off the machine. It's usually stored in three locations:

The three folders are stored (in Vista or Windows 7) under Users or (in XP and before) Documents and Settings, in the profile of whoever uses the machine. They are Favorites (for Web sites bookmarked in Internet Explorer), Desktop, and My Documents.

Copy these three folders and most of the time, you've got everything people want.

Unless, of course, they don't use Internet Explorer. This morning, I got a dying disk from a fellow who uses Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox and has a unique set of bookmarks for each. Gee...thanks Will! Anyone who knows these browsers well knows you can back up and export bookmarks and other settings...but that's not much help when you can't boot into Windows and launch the programs.

Here's where these browsers store their bookmarks and other settings:

Chrome:

%APPDATA%\Google\Chrome\

Firefox:

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\


In Windows 7, %APPDATA% is the folder \Users\\AppData\Local
In XP, %APPDATA% is the folder \Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data

Mozilla bookmarks are stored in a file called places.sqlite. If you can't find it in the Profiles folder, do a diskwide search for it.

Skype fix is in!

Except that it isn't.

To revisit this issue again: The otherwise excellent Skype service really lets itself down in its public support forums. Starting around January 20th, their boards were abuzz with problems surrounding Skype 5.0's Facebook integration feature. A server setting they instituted around then caused some very irritating behavior for Skype users in some corporate networks.

After helping dozens of people at Crash Central to turn off the rain of cascading error messages, I mentioned it to an editor at PC World who asked me to write it up for the PC World BizFeed site.

I did, and within hours, Skype claimed to have fixed the problem.

Here's what Raul said on the Skype support site:

==========
This error has been fixed by us.

You do not need to upgrade your Skype for it, we did the fix on our infrastructure side.

Thank you for raising it here.
==========

...and here's what I say in response: How come nothing's changed, then?

Before getting ready to tell the 100-plus people I support that they can now turn Skype's Facebook integration back on if they like, I tried it out myself. The windows continue to cascade when content filters block Facebook. The CPU usage jumped to maximum. Everything slowed down. In short, things are no different from how they were a month ago.

I'd love to say what Skype wants me to say--that it's all cool, guys, just go ahead as usual--but I can't. That's because I'm the guy they come to when things don't work. And guess what? They still don't work.

Ball's back in your court, Skype. Show them you're as brilliant as I know you can be.

Skype Facebook Failure!

At Crash Central, we've been overwhelmed with complaints of never-ending Internet Explorer windows loading when people launch Skype 5 (which happens automatically on startup in a lot of cases). It's not a virus, we've discovered. It's a case of poor programming.

In a laudable attempt at making your social networks merge into a monolith, the latest iteration of Skype integrates nicely with Facebook. Except when it doesn't. Corporate filters that block social networking sites prevent Skype from getting to Facebook. Skype 5 hasn't been programmed to handle that, so it tries again. And again. And again.

Here's how to stop it:

1. Brace yourself for multiple browser windows.
2. Launch Skype
3. Use Alt-Tab to get through the spawning windows to Skype.
4. Click on the Facebook tab in the right pane of the Skype window.
5. Click on the link labeled Don't Show Facebook In Skype.

This will halt the flow. You'll probably want to restart your system to flush the detritus. But you'll be golden.

Tech Haiku #2

Screwdriver? Check! Patch
cable? Check! Now nobody
Will dare to stop me

Just Finish This For Me: Outlook's AutoComplete function

Just when you think you have configured a new PC to suit its new owner, along they come and say "My email addresses don't just pop up anymore!" Gah! Of course they don't, I curse myself, that's because they're stored locally in the intuitively named AutoComplete File, which has the unintuitively named extension NK2.

This file stores all the email addresses you use regularly, so that when you start to send an email to one of your friends called Dave, for example, you only need to type the first few letters, and up comes every Dave you send email to.

Unless, that is, you get a new PC.

Here's how to move the email autocomplete data to a new PC. First of all, make sure Outlook is NOT running, then follow these steps:

1.On your old PC, the one with the saved AutoComplete names, hold down the Window key and press F. This brings up the search box. Enter *.NK2 as a search term. It'll find a file called Outlook.NK2, or a file with your login name.NK2, probably in the \Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder, or the \Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook folder in Windows 7.

2. Copy the file to a memory stick or email it to yourself.

3. On your new computer, repeat the process in Step 1 to locate the sparsely populated NK2 file. If in doubt, navigate to the folders in Step 1 and see what you find. The AutoComplete file may not have the same name as on the old system, but the extension is the giveaway.

4. Rename the new system's NK2 file (outlook.NK2.bak, for example). Then copy the one from your old machine into the same folder.

5. Power up Outlook to check it works alright.

Presto! The deed is done!

Potential problems:
Guess what? If your file settings are in the default "Microsoft nanny" mode, the Outlook folder may be hidden ("for your protection"). To unhide hidden folders in Windows XP, hold down the Window key and press E to bring up My Computer. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options. Click the View tab, and then burrow through Advanced settings, Hidden files and folders, and click Show hidden files and folders.

Friday Limerick #1

A corporate man in a suit,
Came and told me his laptop won't boot
I saw what was wrong
It's the same old sad song
"That's a briefcase, you dozy old coot!"

Tech haiku #1

PC Load Error
I think I can fix that one
Pass the sledgehammer

It's Debugging Day! When an editor I've worked with for a decade mentioned she wanted an article on software bugs last spring, we decided to publish it on September 9, because it's the 63rd anniversary of the "moth in the relay" incident.

Back in 1947, a team working with Harvard's Mark II computer pulled a dead moth out of the machine, and with a flash of engineer humor, taped it into the log with the caption "First actual case of bug being found."

People who don't know how to read properly assumed that this incident introduced the term "bug" to the computing world--but this old word for a monster had been used in engineering for more than a century before anyone pulled a moth out of a machine at Harvard. But even though it's not a significant day in terms of etymology (or entomology), we thought that September 9 was a good day to celebrate software errors.

We settled on 11 massive failures and a few notable mentions. Check out the article at Computerworld.com. It's called Epic Fail, for obvious reasons.

Bugging out!

I'm in the throes of writing a feature article on computer bugs at the moment. It gave me the chance to revisit an old favorite of mine from 1994. The Pentium floating point flaw was in the news at the time, and it overshadowed this little snippet.

Windows Mis-Calculator

In the four years leading up to the great Pentium flaw scandal, the not-so-great Windows Calculator scandal was flying under the horizon. It came to light in 1994, but it had been kicking around since Windows 3.x first appeared in 1990. CALC.EXE came up with a joke answer that was even funnier than punching 07734 into a handheld calculator, turning it upside down, and saying "hello" to people in leetspeak.

Propeller-heads tried the following math exercise instead:

0 - 2.11

Windows Calculator got the right answer: -2.11. But adding 2.1 to the result yielded an interesting result that broke new ground in mathematics. Instead of -0.01, it introduced the baffling concept of -0.00. We're not entirely sure what minus zero to two decimal places means, but it was fun to geek out to back in 1994.

Yeah, we know how lame that sounds. Remember that this was six years before the millennium. Even geek entertainment was simple back then.

Murky Bucket

It seems that my nation needs me. I left Britain 23 years ago, and now, according to an article in today's Daily Telegraph, people there don't want to say "Thank you" anymore. Of course, they are prepared to render thanks, but they believe that the actual words "thank you" are too formal. So they use informal and even foreign terms instead: Top of the list of informal thank-yous is "cheers." They'd even use the reviled language of French and resort to "merci" rather than saying "thank you." Really!

This goes to prove one thing: I'm an early adopter. "Cheers!" was almost my exclusive way of saying "thank you" back in 1985-87, my last two years on British soil.

You may offer whatever thanks you wish for my blog today in the space provided below. Use whatever terms you choose. For those in need of a thesaurus of colloquial terms of gratitude, the Telegraph provided the following, sorted in order of preference according to their opinion poll:

TOP 20 WAYS TO SAY THANK YOU

1. Cheers

2. Ta

3. That's great

4. Cool

5. OK

6. Brilliant

7. Lovely

8. Nice one

9. Much appreciated

10. You star

11. All right

12. Fab

13. Awesome

14. Wicked

15. Merci

16. Danke

17. Gracias

18. Super

19. Ace

20. Thank you

How low can you go?

Just when you thought you'd found the cheapest domain registrar...someone goes and lowers the bar. This is getting ridiculous! Lots of people offer free domains if you buy into their hosting packages. But 1&1 Internet is taking it too far! For the month of May, they are giving one dot com away per customer. No charge. And their renewals are among the lowest in the cosmos too--a good two bucks less than GoDaddy's.

And if you want to load up on a couple of extra hosting features, their beginner package is $3.99 a month for a ridiculous amount of features--a blog, RSS, phone support, 600 email accounts (IMAP, POP and Webmail, no less), 10GB of site space...I mean, let's get serious here! Nothing for a .com domain? Goosed up for less than fifty bucks per year? Are you making any money for yourselves at all there, guys?

Spot the error

Care to guess what kind of error Cisco Clean Access Agent is reporting here? Cisco does offer a few clues along the way...

Win 7 : Win Users 31

Like every other journalist who's been writing about technology for a while--and anyone else who could be bothered to download 2.6GB of beta code--I have been working with Windows 7 for six months. For the past couple of weeks, I've been working with the final code, the release-to-manufacturing code, the thing that'll be appearing on upgrade discs and new computers in a couple of months.

The verdict? It's a tale of two operating systems. The one you want, and the one you don't want. The best of upgrades, the worst of upgrades. It's not a far, far better thing than Microsoft has ever done before, but it's not a bleak house either.

Okay, I had a dickens of a good time reviewing it for Computerworld. And 31 feedbacks at computerworld.com seem to indicate that it's a flashpoint for people to throw in their two cents'-worth.


Throw your own barbs into the ring after reading the article. And feel free to be as nasty as possible. I'm thick skinned. I have had to be: I've been working with Microsoft beta code for six months now...

CompuServe...site u like?

RIP CompuServe, my old stamping ground. This venerable online community was my introduction to online world, and once made my pockets jingle with loose change, since I was someone who actually earned money by moderating a forum there. It was quite possibly the only online venue I fully understood--at least from a financial point of view.

Let me start out by explaining that the reason I didn't get a postgraduate degree is that I failed economics. Multiple times and by a wide margin. I thought it was because I didn't understand money, but I do understand money. At least, I understand it at a household and personal level, and paradoxically, I learned it not in Econ 101 but in scripture classes at school. From the story of Joseph, to be exact (and to be more exact, mostly from listening to songs about his amazing technicolor dreamcoat so I didn't have to reread the book too often).

The lesson (drawn from Joseph's interpretation of the Pharaoh's dream) was this: There will be seven years of plenty during which you should save up your surplus, followed by seven years of famine during which you'll need to draw on your savings. This nugget of wisdom sprang Joseph from jail and made him powerful in the Egyptian court, making Joseph the first and probably only financial advisor in history to (a) begin his career in jail, instead of ending it there and (b) issue conservative financial advice that rich people took seriously.

The number of years fluctuate--especially on Internet time--but the principle remains the same: Don't squander your surplus because it won't always be there.

Most of my income of the past two decades has tracked the vagaries of the computer world. It was economics at its most Marxian: Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I exchanged services (writing) for money (which came from two sources--magazine subscriptions and print advertising dollars). Later, I earned money managing online communities. I spent vast tracts of my early career on CompuServe and other old-school online communities. The experience earned me money from sources I could understand (visitors paid for every minute of their online time, and CompuServe shared a cut of that with forum operators they called SysOps, of whom I was one).

This easy-to-follow money trail is one reason I took my time getting my head around the whole commercial Internet thing. Content is what keeps people coming back, and if people aren't paying for sites, where will the quality content come from?

As it turns out, sites did find money to pay for content providers (like me) to write articles, such as my most recent one about CompuServe and other old-school online communities. But I'm still not sure where that money is coming from. Readers aren't paying--at least, they're not paying anyone except their ISP, and ISPs aren't paying content sites anything.

Initially, I assumed the money came from venture capital, but are venture capitalists really so nice as to subsidize the world's click-and-read habit indefinitely? Of course not. And after fifteen years of it, surely they would have stopped by now. One of these days, I'll figure out the source of my online income, which dates back to early 1995, the year I first became a Web columnist. But for now, I'm just cranking it out...often writing about CompuServe and other old-school online communities that made sense to me...from an economic perspective at least.

And until the next seven-year cycle of plenty, I'm spending the money I earned during the Web bubble years. I have had to: I already sold my amazing technicolor dreamcoat on eBay.

Camera action

YouTube addiction and parenthood are the twin engines that drive the digital video camera industry. Billions of bytes of wobbly-handed footage no longer languish on hard drives; they're all put video servers and linked to on Facebook.

Don't try to fight it. Just accept it. And if you need to jump on the bandwagon, do it with a decent quality camera with a decent microphone, not the tinny, blocky, jumpy cellphone footage that comprises most of the embarrassing teen postings.

Here's how to get decent video quality at high definition: scope out these reviews of three HD digital video cameras, which I worked up for a Computerworld article.

These cameras are decent quality, low-budget tools; the quality and content of the footage is up to the cameraman and editor. Or as they say in YouTube, you.

Domain steps

Some people have accused me of "confusing" domain registration with hosting. It's one of the less valid responses to my latest article for Computerworld, a review of three budget domain registrars, tucked away on Computerworld's site at
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132959

I certainly cover more domain hosting issues than domain registration issues, mainly because there's more to write about. You register a domain, it's registered. What you do with it after that...well...there's the rub.

I registered my first domains back in 1996, shortly after Network Solutions started charging some exorbitant amount for what had previously been free. Back then, Network Solutions billed you for $100 for two years' registration. The price later dropped to $70 for a two year period. Then in 1999, more registrars came on board--first Register.com, then a flood of them--and the whole business changed.

The first change was the standard billing period: It became annual instead of biannual. Another result of the competition was that pricing dropped to a "standard discount" rate of fifteen dollars per year per domain, and registrars started to lard on features to attract customers. It's those features that have changed and lowered the barrier of entry to becoming your own d0t-com entity.

The thing that prompted me to pitch this review to Computerworld is that you can now get a domain for around ten bucks a year--with POP email and some kind of site hosting thrown into the bargain.

I'm still amazed by this economy of scale. And if it leads to some confusion between registration and hosting, well, so be it. I'm no McDonald's corporation. I don't need heavy duty hosting. And I don't have a big budget for my online projects either. If I can get satisfaction for the price of a Happy Meal...I'll do it.