Utility programs that have come my way

You know I'm a sucker for a good utility. These little special-purpose programs that add features to other applications or operating systems are usually inexpensive and sometimes free. They're almost always the work of one or two people who saw a need and decided to fill it. Today we'll look at some utilities I've found (or had recommended to me) recently.

Mouse Away

This free utility resolves a minor annoyance. When I'm typing, the mouse cursor sometimes gets in the way. I can keep typing, but I often think I've committed a typo under the mouse cursor. The only way to find out is to stop typing, take my hand off the keyboard, reach for the mouse, and move the cursor. Then I can see what I typed wrong and fix it. Or I can see that I didn't type anything wrong and continue – usually typing right into the cursor again.

Wouldn't it be helpful if somebody made a utility that would chase the mouse away from wherever the cursor is?

That's the premise behind Mouse Away and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. Mouse Away offers a surprising feature (aka "bug") that users will eventually learn to work around. If you use the mouse to select text and then use the keyboard to pick up with text (Ctrl-C or Ctrl-X), in some programs (Ultra Edit, for example) Mouse Away will move the cursor before it picks up the text. The result is that you won't get what you expected to get.

Workarounds: Right-click the selected text and choose Cut or Copy.

No workaround is needed if you don't download Mouse Away, though, and instead use Windows XP's built-in mouse hiding function from the Mouse control in the Control Panel:

Source: http://www.geocities.com/mtetrode.

FileAlyzer

This little utility from Safer Networking (the Spybot Search and Destroy folks) has enough features to be considered an application except for the fact that it doesn't do anything but let you examine files. If that seems like not much to do, consider this.

Let's say you spot a file and you're not sure what it is or what it does. You'd like to know more about it, but you really don't want to run it because you're not sure what it is or what it does. (Am I being redundant here?) FileAlyzer to the rescue!

Right-clicking the file name allows me to choose "Analyze with FileAlyzer."

Display of information about executable files:

Display information from a comma-separated values file:

Display information about a JPG file:

The utility is still in development and not all of the features work. Most media files offer a preview option, but in many cases the preview does nothing. With the image of Tangerine, for example, FileAlyzer offers EXIF data but provides very little:

IrfanView, a free image viewer, shows all of the EXIF data:

Despite some shortcomings, FileAlyzer is a must-have.

Source: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/filealyzer/.

PINs

Everybody has too many user IDs and passwords to remember. Making them all the same isn't good for security and writing them on paper is even worse. The solution is a free program called PINs that encrypts all of your user IDs and password, protecting them with a single password that you'd better be able to remember.

A big advantage PINs offers is that the entire application and your password file can easily fit on a thumb drive that you can carry around. If you lose it, the information is encrypted. This is not to say that the encryption can't be broken, but it's extremely unlikely that anyone but the NSA could do it.

When you open your password file, you'll be asked for a password. This is a password that should be secure (at least 8 characters with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.) The password needs to be something you'll find easy to remember but that others won't be able to guess, even if they know a lot about you.

Once the program is open, you'll see all of your user IDs arranged alphabetically within categories that you set up. Not being a fool, I have obscured the user names here and PINs is politely refusing to show the passwords:

The account set-up section of the application provides fields for all essential information, including a "more info" field that lets you include any amount of text.

Note the password shown above. This is a password of medium security. If you look at it long enough, you may see the word "angelhair" with a capital A, 9 in place of g, 7 in place of l, # in place of h, and 1 in place of i. This is not a password I use anywhere or similar in construction to a password I use anywhere.

Source: http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/pins.html.

How safe is the information on your computer?

Symantec has released its 9th semi-annual report on Internet security. It covers the period between July 1, 2005, and the end of the year. The report shows that the face of computer viruses continues to change.

In the past, attacks were mainly designed to destroy data. Today, only rank amateurs do that. Now the goal is to steal information from computers and to do it in a way that won't attract the notice of the user. If data loss concerned you, this troubling development should be even more worrisome.

Malicious code of this type was present in 74% of the top 50 virus and worm threats in the previous 6-month period. In this latest report, 80% of the top 50 treats contained code designed to steal data.

According to Symantec Vice President Arthur Wong, cybercrime is the greatest threat faced by the on-line community. The report also discusses the growing trend of attackers to use "bot" networks -- machines that have been compromised and may be used by criminals.

The threats continue to evolve into multi-part, modular attacks that are designed to be stealthy. The individual components pose little or no threat on their own, but when all of them are assembled on a computer or a network, they can be activated to steal data, send spam, or to host a rogue website designed to spread the chaos.

Symantec says that China experienced the largest increase of bot-infected computers, but that the United States still has the largest number of infected machines. Bots and networks of bots are increasingly the source of attacks.

These networks are also used to serve Web pages that are used in phishing threats. Symantec says there were nearly 8 million phishing e-mails sent every day during the second half of 2005.

The report says Symantec documented 1895 new software vulnerabilities, the largest total recorded number of vulnerabilities since 1998. Of these, 97% were considered moderately or highly severe and 79% were considered easy to exploit.

Be careful out there!

If you think it takes intelligence to steal your information ...

... think again. A retired police officer, when he was on the force, carried around an aluminum clipboard that had an emblem on the back: WDGTSO. "We don't get the smart ones." And so it is with phishing attempts or spyware. People who are can't figure out a legal way to earn money try to steal your money. As for intelligence, none is required.

All it takes is $15. A Russian website offers the WebAttacker spyware kits for $15 and says it will even provide techical support for those who buy the kit.

What do you get for your $15 investment? Scripts designed to simplify the task of infecting computers and instructions for taking over websites that you can then use to infect computers owned by people who follow a link in the spam you will send out. If you can follow simple instructions, you can become a computer crook.

Why would people follow links in spams? Because those who write them are at least smart enough to make them timely. Recent examples include supposed tips for protection from the H5N1 bird flu virus, claims of proof that Slobodan Milosevic was murdered, and such.

The gullible people who visit the site will probably find that their computers have been infected with malicious code. The website identifies the visiting computer's browser, operating system, and installed patches, then launches an application that will download a program that attempts to turn off the firewall and install a password-grabbing keylogger. In other words, it's the next step in the evolution of the "script kiddies".

Nerdly News

A journey of 1000 jobs begins with a single layoff

Lenovo, the Chinese company that purchased IBM's personal computer business says that is plans to cut about 1000 jobs to reduce costs. That's about 5% of the company's workforce.

It's part of a restructuring that will take 6 to 12 months to complete and will save $250 million annually. Lenovo is increasingly competing with low-cost leaders Dell and Hewlett-Packard. In December, Lenovo hired a senior vice president from Dell.

Lenovo says job cuts will be spread among workers in North America, Europe, and Asia, but provided no other details. When Lenovo bought the PC business from IBM, it took about 10,000 IBM employees.

Windows XP on an Apple?

I've been able to do that for a long time. Load a copy of Virtual PC on a Mac and run Windows. Slowly. But it runs. But now Apple is switching its entire product line to Intel processors and maybe Virtual PC is no longer needed.

A couple of hackers have won about $14,000, the top prize offered by a Houston shipping broker for finding a way to run Windows XP natively on a new Macintosh. The hackers have created a dual-boot Mac that can run Apple's OS X or Windows XP.

There seems to be some demand for this -- Apple users who need to run the occasional Windows application, or Apple users who have Windows PCs at the office, or people who want to have both operating systems available but don't want to have 2 computers.

For Colin Nederkoorn, the guy in Houston who sponsored the contest, it's a desire to use some Windows applications without having to buy a second computer. He could have bought a second computer for less than $1000, but instead sponsored the contest with a pay-out of just under $14,000.

The winners, from the San Francisco area, are Jesus Lopez and Eric Wasserman. Lopez had never owned a Mac until Wasserman heard about the contest and suggested that Lopez give it a try.

If you want to run Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac, the hack can be downloaded from http://onmac.net/. Apple has said that it has no intention of selling or supporting Windows on its machines, but it has done nothing that would keep users from doing it on their own.

With typical Apple modesty, senior vice president Phil Schiller said, "If there are people who love our hardware but are forced to put up with a Windows world, then that's OK."

Annoying legal disclaimer

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