Kent J. Chen's WebLog

If you are not aware of how this could be, watch the video below, which may shock you enough with the fact that according to ars technica,

if you photocopy your butt on a modern copier, it’s probably still there, safe on the copier’s hard drive. It exists there along with medical forms, financial documents, and that list of gang members your police department was just about to arrest.

Ouch! Now,

First of all, we know that these big giant machine actually has a hard drive installed inside the machine secretly storing stuff that…

The awesome How-To Geek had a very good post on lifehacker the other day, which I think worths a post space here spreading the word, loudly.

What he basically claimed in the post was

When it comes to keeping your Windows PC secure, all of the scare tactics and overblown virus stories out there make it hard to feel safe online. The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to pay for Windows security.

And he backs up with 6 reasons.

1. Microsoft Security Essentials is a GREAT anti-virus application

MSE is a…

Whether you want to be a good guy who just wants to protect yourself or a bad guy who wants to insult others, you need to cover your own ass, no matter what, especially when doing things online. That’s how hidemyass.com comes in play.

Hide My Ass! helps hundreds of thousands of people daily by protecting their privacy and identity online. They offer a range of unique services, from our web proxy enabling you to surf the web anonymously to our free file hosting with advanced privacy features. Best of all, most of them are free of charge. Here are…

I believe most of people who have been using computer for a certain amount of time have encountered or even suffered this damned never end computer malware, either being a direct victim or being asked to fix it. Finding the better way and the better tool to fight with it seems to have become an inevitable mission to everyone who uses the computer, me included. And for that reason, here are 10 ways to detect computer malware from 10 things that came in quite handy, listed in 3 main…

If you are a fan of using AVG free anti-virus like me, here is a good news for you. AVG now offers its AVG 8.5 Pro edition free, which usually charges for $34US. At least for one year per computer. But, just like the old saying, there is no free lunch in this world. You have to complete one offer through the check out in order to get the free version.

So what’s the difference between the free and pro edition. To be honest, not so much. Let’s see what the free edition offers:

…

I had one colleague whose computer unfortunately got caught by this malware recently.  It looks legitimate enough to foul people to have it installed and scanned your computer.  But in fact,

Antivirus 360 is a rogue anti-spyware program that uses false scan results and aggressive advertising in order to promote itself. This rogue is advertised by the Vundo Trojan and is replacing the Antivirus 2009 rogue program that Vundo has been aggressively advertising. If you are infected with the Vundo Trojan you will see a large amount of pop-ups stating that your computer is infected and that you should install Antivirus

…

Nice essay from Microsoft Technet, the revised 3-part series of edition to the first one published in 2000 by Scott Culp.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore…

The three-day PWN to OWN contest at the CanSecWest security conference finished today here in Vancouver.  The contest this year includes three laptops, running the most up to date and patched installations of MacOS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux on MacBook Air, Fujitsu U810, and Sony VAIO, respectively.

All of them are survived after day 1 which only allows remote pre-auth type attack.  MacBook Air was the only one compromised on day 2 because of one vulnerability in Safari browser.  Vista was defeated almost the last minute in the last day because of the hole in Adobe Flash.  Sony VAIO…

How often does your wireless connection get dropped, if you are using Vista?  If you are same as me, facing this kind of annoying problem every day, blame on Vista.  It’s one of those Vista-incompatible devices on your network causing this problem, the wireless router in particular.

Vista validates your network connection every time when the computer tries to connect to the network.  If your router is not Vista-compatible and you are trying to connect via wireless, it most likely will not get identified the first place and won’t be assigned a valid IP address as the result.  In order to get work, you…

PCWorld.ca has an article today that tells 7 things your company’s IT department doesn’t want you to know which technically I agree most of them. And it’s true that with so many useful awesome online applications out there it’s nearly impossible for IT department to restrict their employees’ use of work PCs and networks to lock down the system and compliant with their policy. However, spreading words like this on a popular site like PCWorld makes our life way much harder, which is why I don’t include the link here.

It’s always true that the most threat to the network…