Nov 03

Firefox 2.0.0.5 Release Fixes the Big IE/Firefox Flaw

Posted in: Freeware, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox IE HackerMozilla released an important update to the Firefox web browser today. The new Firefox 2.0.0.5 fixes a critical flaw that enables a hacker to control a user’s computer. Ironically, this was done by letting the hacker launch Firefox through Internet Explorer, and then Firefox would run malicious instructions that could compromise their system.

Firefox 2.0.0.5 fixes a total of 8 security related bugs: 3 are critical, 2 are high-priority, 1 is moderate, and 2 are minor. Aside from those there are an additional 91 stability fixes with 15 of those being related to Firefox crashing. So this version offers more than just significant security fixes.

No one is quite sure whether the big security bug is Internet Explorer’s fault for passing insecure data to another application, or whether it was Firefox’s fault for not validating the input. At least Mozilla stepped up to fix it before it turned into a widespread vulnerability. And just because Firefox has patched this issue doesn’t mean that you are in the clear from the attack. It was recently discovered that Trillian is also affected when using the AIM portion, and it is expected that other applications are susceptible to the attack as well.

Note: A similar update for Thunderbird is expected shortly.

Download Firefox 2.0.0.5 – It doesn’t appear that Mozilla has enabled the automatic updates through Firefox at this time, so you will have to download it if you don’t want to wait.

Source: Mozilla Links & MozillaZine
Thanks for the tip CoryC!

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Oct 29

CyberNotes: Quickly Assign Hotkeys to Folders, Programs, URL’s, and More

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
When it comes to computers I’d say that keyboard shortcuts (a.k.a. hotkeys) are something I couldn’t imagine not having at my beckon call. Certain applications take advantage of keyboard shortcuts more than others, but what we’re looking to do today is show you how to assign hotkeys to any folder, program, or URL that you come across.

Would you believe that any of the above can be done using a simple drag-and-drop action? It can be with Qliner Hotkeys, and I’ve been using it ever since Nosh introduced me to it last year.

Despite what you might be thinking this isn’t your run-of-the-mill hotkey configuration utility. What makes this special is the fact that it has a configurable on-screen keyboard that displays what key each shortcut is assigned to:

qliner.png
(Click to Enlarge)

How do you get the on-screen keyboard? During installation you were asked whether you wanted to use the Caps Lock key as a replacement for the Windows Key (for keyboards that have no Windows Key). If you choose to do this, hold down the Caps Lock key for 5-seconds, otherwise hold down the Windows Key for 5-seconds.

Did it work? You should have seen the keyboard with the default shortcuts already assigned. To use/activate any of the shortcuts shown just press the Windows Key followed by the key shown on the on-screen keyboard. What you’ve probably noticed by now is that working with the keyboard in this fashion could get quite annoying since it disappears as soon as you release the Windows Key. Try pressing the Windows Key+Z to bring up the keyboard more permanently.

Now you can go to town. I’d start by dragging and dropping your favorite folders and applications onto the shortcut keys:

qliner shortcut.png
(Click to Enlarge)

Don’t limit yourself to just programs and folders though. You can go to any website, and start dragging hyperlinks onto the keyboard to create shortcuts to your favorite URL’s. In this example I’m dragging our logo onto a key to create a shortcut to our homepage:

qliner ie shortcut.png
(Click to Enlarge)

If you make a mistake you can right-click on a key, and then select the Delete option. Also from the right-click menu you can copy and paste shortcuts from one key to another.

Don’t like the drag-and-drop method? The alternative method to adding shortcuts is to right-click on any key that hasn’t already been assigned a shortcut, and go to the New Hotkey menu. From there a wizard will take you through the necessary steps, or you can dive deeper into the menus to find pre-made shortcuts for things like shutting down your computer, minimizing all windows, volume control, and more.

That’s not all either! While you’ve got the keyboard up you can start playing with some of the customization options. To do this just right-click anywhere on an empty space on the keyboard, and start navigating through the menus. You can change the color of the keyboard to black, silver, or slate, and even alter the layout to match that of your laptop. Supported keyboard layouts are:

  • Dell Latitude
  • IBM Laptop
  • Sony VAIO Laptop
  • Standard Desktop Keyboard
  • Toshiba Laptop

I’m not sure if it could get any simpler than this for creating and managing your own hotkeys. If you’ve got a better tool that you use be sure to let us know in the comments.

Get Qliner Hotkeys

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Oct 29

Folding@Home Does a PetaFLOPS

Posted in: Freeware, ps3, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Folding@Home Locations
Folding@Home usage by location

Guinness World Records is recognizing Stanford’s Folding@Home project as the largest distributed computing effort in the world. Distributed computing is becoming a popular method for scientists to get research done without purchasing time on a supercomputer. With distributed computing data is divided up between several computers, or in the case of the Folding@Home project hundreds of thousands of computers, via the Internet.

Using distributed computing the project has been able to acquire over one petaFLOPS of processing power. A lot of the credit for that goes to the Playstation 3 owners out there because over 670,000 consoles are currently contributing some of their processing power to the project (only when the owner isn’t playing a game). The PS3 accounts for roughtly 60% of all contributions to the project. You probably don’t realize what a huge number that is, so let’s put it into perspective. It’s estimated that 10,000 PS3’s working together has the same computational power as IBM’s BlueGene/L System, which is the fastest supercomputer in the world. Yeah, I think you get the idea now. ;)

So what’s Folding@Home all about? The project’s focus is on protein folding and misfolding, which is a known cause for serious illnesses:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.”
…
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

So go ahead and donate some of your processing power to the Folding@Home project, whether you only have a computer or a PS3. The software download for both can be found here, and by doing so you could be contributing to the next medical miracle.

[via CNet]

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Oct 28

Desktop Icon Position Save Restore

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Software, Tips and Tricks, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Desktop IconsDesktop icons seem to have a mind of their own, and when you least expect it they will popup in different positions. This happens all the time when I plug my laptop into a second monitor since the two screens have a different resolutions.

There are some things that you can do to save the position of your icons, and quickly be able to restore them back to their rightful state. The How-To Geek posted a great tip today on how to do this the easy way. I’ve actually been using tweak since back in the early days of XP (for at least 5 years now) and is probably one of the oldest sites that still resides in my bookmarks. I had originally found it on a site called NTHelp, and the "hack" has been a must-have addition all these years for me (on both XP and Vista).

All you have to do is download the two files, either from NTHelp or How-To Geek, and copy the Layout.dll into your C:’Windows’System32’ directory. Then double-click on Layout.reg to have the contents of the file imported into your registry, and now you’re all set. You can now save and restore the position of your desktop icons simply by right-clicking on the Computer option in your Start Menu:

Desktop Icon Position Saver

The only problem with this is that it can’t remember multiple "profiles" for your desktop icons. Having multiple profiles that you can switch between would be nice for anyone that hooks their laptop up to several different monitors that all have different resolutions (work, home, standalone, etc…). The program I’ve always recommended to people in that situation is Shock Desktop (XP/2000/2003/Vista). It provides a System Tray icon that lets you create as many different profiles as you would like:

Desktop Icon Position

The program is completely free, and there is a version that comes with an installer as well as one without an installer. One of the unique features that it does actually have is the ability to bring your desktop icons in front of all the windows using an assignable hotkey. You’ll no longer have to minimize all your windows to get to your desktop icons! I’ve had problems with this working on Vista, but on XP it is a nice addition.

Tip: You can also get to your desktop icons quickly in Windows by pressing the Windows Key + D. This will minimize all your open windows, and pressing the same key combination will restore all of the windows that were just minimized.

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Oct 26

Convert Extract Audio from Videos

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Music, Newly Released, Software, Tips and Tricks, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on September 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

pazera.png
(Click to Enlarge)

There have been a few times where I’ve wanted to extract audio from video files, but it’s not always easy to find a free tool that can successfully do that. I highly recommend grabbing the free Pazera app if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. To make it even more useful the program also doubles as an audio conversion utility.

What are some things you can do with this? One great example is taking an FLV video (such as one from YouTube), and turning it into a standard MP3 music track. Think of all the free music you could get by doing this! It’s important to note, however, that the audio quality of a YouTube video isn’t exactly the greatest.

Here’s a list of video and audio formats it supports during the conversion process, and also some great features you should know about:

  • Video conversion: AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, MPG, WMV, ASF, MOV, QT, FLV, SWF, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, RM, RMVB, MKV, VOB, VCD DAT, OGM, AMV to MP3, AAC, AC3, WMA, FLAC or WAV.
  • Audio conversion: WAV, MP3, AC3, AAC, M4A, MPC, MPA, MP2, WMA, FLAC, SHN, APE, OGG, WV, AMR to MP3, AAC, AC3, WMA, FLAC or WAV.
  • Profiles. Users can create custom profiles, or you can select from one of the many already available.
  • Doesn’t need any installation. Just extract ZIP archive and click AudioExtractor.exe file. All of the settings are stored in a single file so that it can be carried around with you!

I guess if Super doesn’t do the trick that this just might.

Get Pazera [via Lifehacker]

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Oct 21

Mozilla Ditching Thunderbird?

Posted in: Email, Freeware, Mozilla, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox Eats ThunderbirdMitchell Baker, Mozilla’s CEO, announced on her blog today that Thunderbird hasn’t been receiving the attention that it deserves. As a result they are looking at a number of options to let Thunderbird continue to grow and flourish, but I don’t like how all of this sounds. Take a look at this snippet from the post:

The Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future.

To "help" Thunderbird they are looking at three different options that will give the project the attention it deserves. Here’s what can happen with it:

  1. Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation – a Thunderbird foundation. If it turns out Thunderbird generates a revenue model from the product as Firefox does, then a Thunderbird foundation could follow the Mozilla Foundation model and create a subsidiary.This model probably offers the maximum independence for Thunderbird. But it is also the most organizationally complex.
  2. Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird. This has less overhead, although it still requires a new company that serves the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. In this case the Mozilla Foundation board and personnel would remain involved in Thunderbird. The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility.
  3. Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey or Camino, and a small independent services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model.

So I’m not sure what this sounds like to you, but it almost sounds like they are wanting to get Thunderbird out of their hands so that they can focus solely on Firefox…because that’s where the money is at right now. As we reported earlier this year Mozilla had earned more than $52 million in 2005 while spending a frugal $8 million of that on expenses and salaries. I’m guessing that Mozilla only wants to focus on the projects that will make them money even though they have plenty put away for a rainy day.

The interesting part is that Mitchell goes on to say that they don’t want to forget about mail all together though:

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

To me this sounds like two people breaking up because something better has come along, where they just say that they "need their space." So I’m not overly hopeful anymore that we’ll see true innovation coming out of Thunderbird anymore. I honestly see that as being disappointing news, but I guess Mozilla has to do what’s best for the Foundation.

Let me know if I’m taking this the wrong way, or whether you see this as "the end" of Thunderbird as well.

Source: Mitchell Baker’s Blog [via Mozilla Links & Info World]

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Oct 20

CyberNotes: Protect and Secure your Browser with Sandboxie

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Internet Explorer, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Web Browser Wednesday

We’ve written a lot about protecting your computer while browsing the Internet, and now we thought it was a good time to cover an application that quite a few of you have recommended. Sandboxie is a free (for the most part) application that can wrap itself around your browser to provide a more secure session when downloading applications or trying out new extensions.

Sandboxie serves as a middle man between an application, which for our purposes today is a Web browser, and the hard drive. When you want to protect the browser you simply run it in a “sanboxed” mode through the Sandboxie menu:

Sandboxie

Then anything that you do from within the browser is stored in a sandbox that can be deleted at anytime. Don’t quite understand? I’ll walk you through a common scenario that explains it a little better. The first thing I did after installing Sandboxie was start Internet Explorer by using the menu option seen in the screenshot above, but you can use your default browser by choosing the respective option.

Sandboxie

One thing that you’ll notice in the screenshot is that the window title for Internet Explorer has a “[#]” on each end. This represents that I’m running that program in a sandbox.

Now lets say I came across a program that I want to try out, but I’m not too sure whether I’ll like it or I’m not sure if it is going to try and install a virus on my system! With Sandboxie you just download and run the installation as you normally would, and if you watch the Sandboxie process explorer you’ll notice that even the installer runs in a sandbox:

Sandboxie

Don’t worry about doing anything special…Sandboxie takes care of it all! After the program is done installing you can go ahead and run it. The program will work just like you expect it to, but underneath lies a secret that is keeping you secure! When the program installed everything it did was placed in a special location on your hard drive (registry settings, files, Start Menu links, etc…).

If you want to get to the location where the files are stored just go to Function -> Contents of Sandbox -> Explorer Contents and you will instantly be presented with the area where all the files are being stored. After installing Taskbar Shuffle into the default sandbox that I made, here is what the file structure looked like in Vista:

Sandboxie

It replicated everything in my Vista folder structure perfectly, and as you can see, it will create a different folder for each sandbox that you make. That way you can switch between sandboxes depending on what you are doing, and if you ever want to get rid of a program you don’t have to worry about uninstalling it…just delete the corresponding sandbox!

If you’re looking for the ultimate privacy control in your Web browser then Sandboxie also has a setting for you. You can designate a sandbox to automatically be emptied after each use. If you run your browser in a sandbox, as soon as you finish everything will instantly be wiped clean…talk about covering your tracks! :)

Some of these features are compliments of the new Sandboxie version 3 that was just released yesterday. Features such as automatic sandboxing of a Windows Installer as well as sandboxing Windows Explorer is all new, and I have thoroughly been enjoying the work that has been put into this new version.

Sandboxie doesn’t cost a thing and you can use it as long as you would like, except for one small catch. After 30-days it will periodically pop-up asking for you to enter in a registration code. You can continue to use the program for as long as you would like, but you will have to get a valid registration code for $25 if you don’t want to get nagged.

Sandboxie supports 32-bit versions of Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista and 64-bit versions of Windows XP/2003. The installer is just 245KB, so the whole thing is a small and efficient application.

Sandboxie Homepage

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Oct 17

Flock 2.0 Based on Firefox 3 – Beta Coming Soon

Posted in: Features, Firefox 3, Freeware, performance, Pre-Release, Release Date, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on June 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is hard at work getting ready for the launch of Firefox 3, and another Release Candidate is scheduled to be available tomorrow. They are still planning for a June launch of the next major milestone, and there is a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding the release. One thing you don’t want to forget about is the Flock browser that is based upon Firefox!

The Flock team is working equally as hard to make sure that they update their browser with all of the Firefox 3 goodness as soon as possible. As you might recall it took them quite awhile to update their browser to Firefox 2 after its release, but it appears that they won’t be making that same mistake again. Here’s a snippet that I took from a post on the Flock blog yesterday:

Within the coming weeks Flock will release it’s first beta of Flock 2.0, which incorporates the Mozilla technology that powers Firefox 3. So get ready to have all of the latest performance (memory management), security and feature enhancements found in the latest Firefox 3 release along with the unique user experience innovations only delivered by the Flock browser.

The first thought that popped into my head was that the nightly builds of Flock must already have the Firefox 3 integration if a Beta will be available in the coming weeks. Sure enough! I downloaded the nightly build (targeted towards developers only), and as you can see from the screenshot it is definitely based on Firefox 3:

Note the oversized location bar new to Firefox 3:
flock 2 firefox 3.jpg
(Click to Enlarge)

The about screen verifies my findings, and a little snooping around will reveal some other new features that have only been introduced in Firefox 3. The most significant enhancement that I noticed would have to be the performance though. Immediately after starting up Flock it was using 66MB of memory which is a little on the high side, but it barely crawled above 100MB even after opening a dozen different tabs. Closing all of the tabs brought the memory usage back down to 82MB. This is like half the amount that the current version of Flock uses for me!

Kudos to the Flock team for jumping on the Firefox 3 bandwagon so quickly because it’s really going to pay off in the long run. I am very much anticipating the release of Flock 2.0 Beta in the coming weeks after they’ve had some time to polish-up the nightly builds, but if you’re feeling ambitious go ahead and try the latest nightly build of Flock 2.0.

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Oct 15

CyberNotes: Download Wikipedia Pages (with Images) for Offline Use

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on April 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Time Saving Tuesday

Wikipedia MediaWikipedia is an absolute phenomenon when it comes to aggregating the knowledge of people around the world. There are over 75,000 active contributors working on more than 5,300,000 articles in more than 100 languages (source). The number of articles is growing tremendously from month-to-month with an increase of about 6% every month…that’s about 300,000 new articles per month!

The success of Wikipedia is astounding to say the least. The site puts millions of articles at your fingertips, but what about when you’re not on the Internet? Below you’ll find four solutions for taking Wikipedia articles offline so that you can read them anywhere.

—Wikipedia on CD/DVD—

This is probably the most convenient way to get your hands on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia on DVD project contains a collection of 2,000 articles (including images) using software called Kiwix to make browsing and searching the articles a lot easier:

Kiwix

As of right now, the software comes in an ISO image format which makes it faster to get it burned to a CD or DVD. The file weighs in at 421MB so it is still able to fit on a CD, but as they continue to increase the number of articles that are included I would expect that it will only be available for DVD’s. If you’re not able to burn the CD then you can purchase it for $13.90 plus shipping (which is $1.54 in the United States).

You can browse all of the included articles here and you’ll notice that they still include many of the links, such as the “Related Articles”, at the bottom. What’s nice is that they point the links to the articles on the CD so that you don’t have to be online to read related articles. The downside is that not every related article is available on the DVD so some of them are not hyperlinked.

 

—Wikipedia HTML Pages—

Wikipedia actually provides all of the HTML pages for the articles on a monthly basis. The download is broken up into several files because all of them together total about 6GB…and remember that is just for text!

The latest version of the HTML pages that’s available is from December 2006 and you’ll need 7–zip to uncompress the files.

There are still image files available from November 2005 that total 75GB, but on the download site they say that the updated image files should be available in the middle of 2007. If the image file from 2005 is 75GB…I don’t even want to know how big the current one is considering at that time they had 836,000 articles on the English site, and now the English site has over 1.7 million!

 

—Wikipedia Database Download—

ZipediaThere are also dumps of the Wikipedia database that you can download if you want the most current information available. These also don’t contain the images and the downloads are still several gigabytes.

To view these pages you’ll need to run MySQL or mediawiki…or as an alternative you can download and install the Zipedia Firefox Extension.

 

—Wikipedia on Your iPod—

Lastly, there is the Encylopodia project who’s goal is to put Wikipedia articles on your iPod. The download is 1.5GB and provides search capabilities so that you can quickly find the information that you’re looking for. Unfortunately this won’t work for anyone who has a 5th generation iPod video or an iPod Nano, but it should work for everyone else.

Encyclopodia

 

—Overview—

I’m sure by now you realize how large Wikipedia is, and there is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to its massive size and insane growth rate. If Wikipedia was to be published in a set of books similar to hardcopy encyclopedias, this is how many it would take:

Wikipedia on Book

If there is truth to the saying “knowledge is power” then Wikipedia probably owns the world. :)

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Oct 07

Internet Explorer Users Can Get Spell Check, Too

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 23, 2006 by CyberNet.

IESpell - Spell Check for Internet Explorer

Firefox 2 was just released and I think that most of you would agree that one of the most popular features is the inline spell checking. Everyone seems to love that since we have become so accustomed to using it in word processors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org.

Firefox is the only web browser that I know of that has the inline spell checking but other browsers, such as Flock, also have spell checking functionality. These spell checkers are typically initiated by pressing a “Spell Check” button which isn’t quite as easy but it is still useful.

Internet Explorer is one of the browsers that lacks any kind of built-in spell checker. The ieSpell add-on, however, will let you spell check any text fields in Internet Explorer but it doesn’t do it inline like Firefox does. You’ll receive the standard prompt that walks you through the spelling mistakes one at a time.

Early last week I discussed another add-on that mimics the Find As You Type feature that Firefox has. Maybe the IE team should take some notes from the add-ons that people are creating to add functionality to their browser. Mozilla learned from extension developers when they were working on Firefox 2 because several of the new features had already been done with extensions, like the Undo Close Tab and Session Restore.

In Windows Vista I never even have to use Internet Explorer anymore because they pulled Windows Update from being web-based to being a Control Panel module. In the few weeks that I have been using Vista I think I’ve only opened IE twice…and both of those were to answer questions that someone had asked me.

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